Callidus and I discuss Annihilation

Usually I try to think of a catchy title for each post, but I figured that with this one, the catchiest title is the simple truth. Last week Callidus and I each saw Annihilation in our separate hometowns, and then we got together on Skype to discuss it. He's just posted the podcast (which runs just over one hour), on his website, and you can listen to it here.

Stay tuned for more posts about my writing plans for the future and how you can help me decide where to go from here.

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

Hello again, everyone. Some of my problems are beginning to resolve, and the writing bug is biting again - just nibbling right now, but I think it's going to start chomping in earnest pretty soon. I'll be sure to keep you updated as I start writing again. Oh, and I also had a truly mind-blowing vampire dream last week that I have to tell you about because it's just too hot to keep to myself.

But this post is about a new podcast I literally just finished recording with Callidus. When he first interviewed me for his show The Black Room a couple of years ago, we talked about Annihilation, a book we'd both enjoyed which was - at that point - in pre-production to become a movie. Back then, we talked about how much fun it would be if we could see it together and record a podcast about it afterwards, and we sort of managed to do that. We didn't get to meet in person, but we did watch the movie at the same time in our separate hometowns and then got right onto Skype to compare notes. I don't want to spoil anything for those of you waiting for the podcast, but I can tell you that we both loved the movie - although we each had different small issues with it - and that we had lots to discuss. This is one of those "watercooler" movies that people will be arguing about for years.

Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties with the recording - which Callidus can certainly work out - but the release of the podcast might be delayed a bit while he does his magic. In the meantime, you can look forward to that post about my vampire dream and more posts about where my writing is headed.

And to whet your appetites about the movie, here's a sinister little clip where Natalie Portman's husband (Oscar Isaac) comes home and he's not...exactly...himself...

Update on the MC/hypno-themed movie Annihilation

Remember the book Annihilation, which I've raved about several times on this blog? I even included some lengthy quotes to demonstrate just how heavily it relied on MC and non-consensual hypnosis. I loved it and recommend it highly. If you missed my  old posts, or if you just want to see them again, click on the link above. I also discussed the story at length in my podcast interview with Callidus (Start at 1:00:26) because we'd recently learned that it was going to be adapted into a movie by Alex Garland of Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, and Dredd fame.

But after the news that Garland was making a movie, there came a long stretch where we heard nothing but crickets. Fortunately, Paramount has finally released a few snippets of footage at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. Don't ask me why they chose that con. In fact, if you know why they chose that con, tell me. (Better still, if you were there, give us all a full report!)

Anyway, it really was just snippets, but even the people who hadn't read the book and didn't know what they were looking at still came away excited. I'd hoped the footage would find its way online, but it hasn't; all I've seen are lots of articles describing that footage. io9 has the best, most MC-ish take, so that's the one I'll quote from:

The setting is a typical suburban house. Inside it is Natalie Portman’s character, and she’s crying. She’s lost someone and seems to be packing up or fixing the house to move out. Then, a man starts to walk up the stairs. It’s Oscar Isaac’s character, who just so happens to be the man Portman thought was dead. She’s stunned, excited, confused, and runs up to kiss him. But he’s almost not there. Unaware. Cold. Not kissing her back.

We move downstairs to the kitchen table where Isaac is sitting absolutely still with a full glass of water in front of him. She explains that he’s been missing for a year. No one knew where he was or what happened. He just disappeared. She asks if his mission was covert and he says “Maybe,” then “Yes.” She asks where he was and he says he doesn’t know where he was. “How is that possible?” she asks. “You must be able to tell me something,” she adds, now getting frustrated. “Does it matter?” he asks in a super creepy way. That shakes her but, finally, he’s about to open up.

“I was outside the room. The room with the bed. I saw you and recognized you. I recognized your face,” he says, which is very confusing to everyone. He takes a sip of water and says he’s not feeling well, which is when we see the blood. Portman’s character calls and ambulance and they’re off to the hospital. Isaac is convulsing, obviously very sick, and then three black SUVs stop the ambulance.
They break in, take them both out, and knock out Portman. She wakes up in some kind of hospital or prison with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. “Where’s my husband, I want to see a lawyer!” she says. We get a quick shot of Isaac’s character and it looks like he has silver makeup around his eyes in the hospital. Finally, Leigh’s character tells Portman’s what going on.

She explains there was an event. Maybe religious, maybe alien, they don’t know. Now there’s a mysterious area of the planet. They keep sending people there but no one has come back, she explains. “Now something has,” Portman says, referring to Isaac. “I need to know what’s inside.”
Portman then joins a team as they head into the area. This is when the footage sped up, mostly because I’m sure these parts of the movie are still being worked on. But here are a few of the images I remember. We see her and the other cast members walking towards almost like a blurry section of land. There’s a shot of Portman with a machine gun. A shot from inside some kind of big creature’s mouth of Jennifer Jason Leigh. People in a yard that seems to be made of vines. A vine-like substance growing on someone’s arm. Lights and colors and flashes that kind of looked like 2001. And that was that.

And now I'm going to share a video I did find on YouTube, of two very enthusiastic guys who didn't read the book but were nevertheless blown away by the teaser. Put their dialogue next to the quote above, and you might get an idea of how close or far the movie the movie might differ from the book. Also, if you have read the book, these guys' crazy theories will make you fall off your chair laughing.

Does this get your motor running?

Last week I blogged about the fact that Oscar Isaac had been cast in the upcoming movie adaptation of Annihilation. He'll be playing the biologist's (Natalie Portman) husband - a secondary character in the book who should have lots more screen time in the movie. You see, the book is told from the biologist's point of view during the twelfth expedition, as she tries to find out what happened to her husband during the eleventh expedition. Eventually she discovers his journal and learns the truth by reading it, but you just know that in the movie we'll see his story play out live. And trust me, it's going to be very exciting.

But while we're waiting for the movie to start production, what about a little more background on what happened when the eleventh expedition returned from Area X? The passages I'm going to quote will give you some small spoilers, but since they're all within the first 40 pages of the book, it shouldn't matter much. So if you want to read about virile young men being turned into zoned-out zombies - and the biologist's attempt to have sex with one of those zombies - read on. And for maximum effect, imagine Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac in these two roles.

The first quote begins after the biologist has explained how the returnees just showed up, at various and in various places, with no clear idea how they got back from Area X. The second quote explains how her husband returned, and how she handled his bizarre reappearance.

---

 
Estrangement, in all of its many forms, was nothing new for these missions. I understood this from having been given an opportunity along with the others to view videotape of the reentry interviews with the members of the eleventh expedition. Once those individuals had been identified as having returned to their former lives, they were quarantined and questioned about their experiences. Reasonably enough, in most cases family members had called the authorities, finding their loved one’s return uncanny or frightening. Any papers found on these returnees had been confiscated by our superiors for examination and study. This information, too, we were allowed to see.

The interviews were fairly short, and in them all eight expedition members told the same story. They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken no unusual readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts. But after a period of time, each one of them had had the intense desire to return home and had set out to do so. None of them could explain how they had managed to come back across the border, or why they had gone straight home instead of first reporting to their superiors. One by one they had simply abandoned the expedition, left their journals behind, and drifted home. Somehow.

Throughout these interviews, their expressions were friendly and their gazes direct. If their words seemed a little flat, then this went with the kind of general calm, the almost dreamlike demeanor each had returned with - even the compact, wiry man who had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight apart. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.

---

In case you couldn't guess, the "compact, wiry man" with the "mercurial and energetic personality" was the biologist's husband. Now, skipping ahead just a little, let's see what happened when he returned.

---

One night, about a year after he had headed for the border, as I lay alone in bed, I heard someone in the kitchen. Armed with a baseball bat, I left the bedroom and turned on all the lights in the house. I found my husband next to the refrigerator, still dressed in his expedition clothes, drinking milk until it flowed down his chin and neck. Eating leftovers furiously.

I was speechless. I could only stare at him as if he were a mirage and if I moved or said anything he would dissipate into nothing, or less than nothing.

We sat in the living room, him on the sofa and me in a chair opposite. I needed some distance from this sudden apparition. He did not remember how he had left Area X, did not remember the journey home at all. He had only the vaguest recollection of the expedition itself. There was an odd calm about him, punctured only by moments of remote panic when, in asking him what had happened, he recognized that his amnesia was unnatural. Gone from him, too, seemed to be any memory of how our marriage had begun to disintegrate well before our arguments over his leaving for Area X. He contained within him now the very distance he had in so many subtle and not so subtle ways accused me of in the past.

After a time, I couldn’t take it any longer. I took off his clothes, made him shower, then led him into the bedroom and made love to him with me on top. I was trying to reclaim remnants of the man I remembered, the one who, so unlike me, was outgoing and impetuous and always wanted to be of use. The man who had been a passionate recreational sailor, and for two weeks out of the year went with friends to the coast to go boating. I could find none of that in him now.

The whole time he was inside me he looked up at my face with an expression that told me he did remember me but only through a kind of fog. It helped for a while, though. It made him more real, allowed me to pretend.

But only for a while. I only had him in my life again for about twenty-four hours. They came for him the next evening, and once I went through the long, drawn-out process of receiving security clearance, I visited him in the observation facility right up until the end. That antiseptic place where they tested him and tried without success to break through both his calm and his amnesia. He would greet me like an old friend - an anchor of sorts, to make sense of his existence - but not like a lover. I confess I went because I had hopes that there remained some spark of the man I’d once known. But I never really found it. Even the day I was told he had been diagnosed with inoperable, systemic cancer, my husband stared at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.

He died six months later. During all that time, I could never get beyond the mask, could never find the man I had known inside of him. Not through my personal interactions with him, not through eventually watching the interviews with him and the other members of the expedition, all of whom died of cancer as well.

Whatever had happened in Area X, he had not come back. Not really.

One point to ponder and another to excite you

I'd planned to write about one thing this week, but then I heard some news that gave me a second subject to talk about; and since the two happen to be tangentially related, I'm giving you both.

First, let's talk about a little movie coming out soon, which you might have heard about: X-Men: Age of Apocalypse. The most recent trailer and promotional images include several shots of Apocalypse's eyes turning white when he uses his powers. Now, if you've followed the X-Men comics for a while, you know that several mutants have white eyes - either permanently white, or just white when they use their powers (Storm seems to go both ways. Hah....Sorry.)

Now, I grew up reading DC comics instead of Marvel, and (as I've said many times) watching Superfriends and other Saturday morning cartoons that used white eyes to show that a person was under someone else's power rather than to show the person had special powers of their own. Then there's that drool-inducing scene in Big Trouble in Little China that I'm sure pushes all our buttons. With all that in my history, I'm much more inclined to connect white eyes with MC than with power.

But it's not that simple. Think about white-eyed zombies, again mindless and will-less; but then contrast them with video game characters whose eyes turn white when they use magic. The fact is that in fantasy and SF, white eyes can have one of two contradictory meanings. My guess is that the "white eyes=power" meme is newer and probably started with Marvel Comics, but that's just a guess; and figuring out the origin of the idea is less interesting than figuring out why someone came up with it. I like to imagine that he/she/they were already MC and/or white-eye fetishists who just couldn't get enough, so they decided to tack a second meaning onto the look just so they could include it in more comics. Maybe that's how it happened, and maybe it isn't. All I know is that I get almost as turned on by white eyes that symbolize power as I do by white eyes that symbolize MC.

And now on to my second, related topic, the one that I hope will excite you as much as it excites me - and I am very excited indeed. You probably know who Oscar Isaac is now that he's played Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens, and of course that's him in the top photo playing Apocalypse. He also starred in Ex Machina, which I raved about back in January and which - stay with me here, because this is important  - was written and directed by Alex Garland. Garland is a genius and Oscar Isaac is this generation's Pacino, only with a geeky SF bent. And the two of them together are going to be working on the movie adaptation of Annihilation, a book I blogged about several times last year because it's the start of a trilogy that leans heavily on hypnosis and MC. The actual star of the movie is another highbrow actor-geek, Natalie Portman, but I'll wait until the next paragraph to tell you who Oscar Isaac is playing because it's a small spoiler and I want to give you a chance to back out if you want to stay spoiler-free. But I'll try not to say anything that you wouldn't see in the movie trailers, so I'd personally recommend you keep reading. This is going to be hot.

Okay, still with me? Natalie Portman is playing the biologist (None of the characters in this book have names), and she's one of four women who've been sent into what might possibly be alien-occupied territory in the Florida swamps called Area X. I wrote more about the setup in my previous posts, so I'll let you follow the link above if you need the details. But here's something I didn't tell you before. We find out somewhere near the middle of Annihilation that the biologist had a husband who was on the expedition prior to hers. He came back, but only sort of, and finding out what happened to him is one of her chief reasons for going there. You see, before hubby went into Area X, he was a brilliant, vibrant, and probably very sexy man. But the person who came back from Area X was just a shell: reminiscent of the man the biologist loved, but flattened and confused and just...not all there.

Well, Oscar Isaac is playing the biologist's husband, and Oscar is a brilliant, vibrant, sexy man. Seeing him go through that transformation will be simultaneously horrifying and hot as fuck. I'm going to be even more sexually confused about him than I am right now, and I have a ginormous straight crush on the guy (How could I not? Just look at him!). Watching him get turned into a zombie is going to throw me into system overload. Even now, I'm getting dizzy thinking about it.

So there you have it: Oscar Isaac and Natalie Portman in a SF/fantasy/horror movie with a strong MC element, written and directed by Alex Garland. It just doesn't get any better than this...until you add in Jennifer Jason Leigh as the psychologist! I'd never have thought of her for that role, but whoever did think of her was a genius. She's going to knock it out of the park. They all are. I can't wait for this movie to come out.

Doubleplusgood

Let me start with a context-free quote. Context wouldn't help much in this case, anyway:

(c) Zdzisław Beksiński

The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck, although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected visions. The umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar's umbilical wind around the nerves in the person's neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock, convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and taste of lime. There is no release from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a time, the tubes glistening and churling in the elision of the steam, the continual need. Thus fitted, all go forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the City opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the eye is the world. 

That's a quote from a short story called "Three Days in a Border Town," by Jeff VanderMeer. Even after reading the whole story for myself, I'm not completely sure how much mind control the familiars exert over the people they're attached to, but clearly there's some. And doesn't it make you delightfully squirmy? You can read the full story online for free; I'll give you the link at the bottom of this post. But for now, let's move on.

It's been about two months since I finished VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (I blogged about the first two books here and here). I've been dying to tell you what I thought about the conclusion, but other topics came first. Now it's time to finish what I - or, rather, VanderMeer - started. The first and second books in the series contained lots of mind control, seemingly via hypnosis, although I noted that the levels of control were too high to be caused by real-world hypnosis. Well, I was right. The character known as "the Voice" in Book 2 is a megalomaniac who loves thinking up new and better ways to warp people's minds. Here's a quote from Acceptance. I've taken out the Voice's real name and gender pronouns as well as a few other spoilery details:

Light hypnotic suggestion, conditioning that's more about Area X survival than any of the Voice's dubious "value adds," his/her claims to have found a way around the need, on some level, for the subject to want to perform the suggested action - "a kind of trickery and substitution." The stages you've seen described are identification, indoctrination, reinforcement, and deployment, but _____ has seen other documents that borrow the semiotic of the supernatural: "manifestation, infestation, oppression, and possession."

Most of the Voice's attention has concreted around _____, a volunteer with radicalized ideas about the value of free will. You wonder if the Voice prefers it when there's more or less resistance.

Then there's this quote:

They implant in the brain of _____ what the Voice calls "a pearl of surveillance and recall." Some tiny subset of the silver egg that is Central, passing first through the Voice's deforming grip. They make a man not himself, and you along with it to keep your job, to stay close to what is important to you.

Now, I have to admit that mind control doesn't play as big as role in Acceptance as I expected. Most of the MC takes place in Book 2, Authority. And I know my readers; MC is what you come here to read about. Still, there's so much else worth reading in the Southern Reach trilogy that I recommend it to you anyway just because it's fantastic. It's like Lovecraft on LSD with a side helping of three-dimensional characters and hope. Again I'm being careful to avoid spoilers, but if you've read the first two books and haven't decided whether to pick up the conclusion, here's some of what you'll learn: the ultimate fates of the biologist and her husband, what the hell the psychologist from Annihilation was up to all this time, what happened to the lighthouse keeper, why Whitby is such a basket case, and whether or not Control ever gains control of himself. You also mostly...probably...learn what caused Area X, although the details are open to debate. And I did debate them at length in a Goodreads thread on the series until I felt satisfied with my conclusions (even if not everyone agreed with me). If you've read the whole series, and/or if you don't mind being spoiled to hell and back, here's the thread. Feel free to hop in with your own thoughts.

Now back to VanderMeer in general. The guy clearly has an interest in MC; different forms of it show up in many of his stories, although not in fetishy ways. He uses it for the sake of horror, and believe me, that man knows how to do horror. The quote at the top of this post comes from VanderMeer's short story collection The Third Bear; and the title story is absolutely, no-question-about-it, unrelentingly horrific. So is "Predecessor." But "Three Days in a Border Town" is more like Mad Max with aliens, "Shark God vs. Octopus God" is just plain funny, and "Errata" is - oh God, just read it for yourself. I keep going on about VanderMeer because the more I read his stuff, the more I love it. I think a lot of you will, too; and several stories from The Third Bear are free online. You can find links to them all in this one helpful review. Just do yourself a favor and start with Errata. It's a standalone story with everything that's freaky and wonderful about Vandermeer in one tidy little package. Check it out and let me know what you think of it.

seriously kinky shit

This is me...more or less. I've started messing around with the Bitstrips app on Facebook, and this is actually a pretty good likeness. Also, I have indeed been writing some seriously kinky shit lately.

"What Do You Give The Alien Who Has Everything?" is coming along swimmingly. Instead of doing the barbecue-and-fireworks thing for Independence Day, I spent most of the weekend indoors typing - and I loved it. I am deep in the zone and very pleased with how the story is coming together. I can't wait to share it with you. It's hard to do a word count for a Choose Your Own Adventure, but by my best estimation, I wrote over 10,000 words this weekend - and that's just a small fraction of the story's total length. So far. ;-P

A couple of people have asked me whether I plan to make the original "What Do You Give the Man Who Has Everything?" available again. I don't think so, no. When you read "What Do You Give the Alien," you'll see that a good 80% of "What Do You Give the Man" is still in there, and you'll have about eighty times as much new story on top of the old.

This won't be a long post; I don't suppose many people are spending their weekend online anyway. But I to talk for a minute about another subject, completely unrelated to what's above. In between bouts of writing over the weekend, I started reading another Jeff VanderMeer book, City of Saints and Madmen. It's a collection of interconnected stories centering on a fantastical, slightly steampunk city called Ambergris. There are monsters, both human and inhuman. There is fungus. But this book is so unlike the Southern Reach series that it's hard to believe they were written by the same author.

Now, City of Saints and Madmen didn't grip me immediately the way Annihilation and Authority did. In fact, I actually thought at first that I'd wasted my money buying it. Then the book took the same kind of hard left turn that VanderMeer pulled off at the beginning of Authority, and I'm pretty sure I actually said "holy fucking shit" out loud. You might think you know where the first story is heading. You might think you know where VanderMeer wants you to think it's heading, and that you know where it's really heading instead. Well, he is trying to make you think it's heading somewhere - and he's probably even trying to make you think you know where it's really heading in spite of where it appears to be heading. But you'll still be wrong about where it's heading.

If you're confused, you're meant to be.

A great "breaking out of hypnosis" scene

I'm most of the way through Authority, the second book in Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy (and am incidentally eating my heart out because the final book won't be published until September). I've been dying to blog about it here, although it's hard to find a way around the spoilers. But when I reached the two scenes I'm about to quote below, I knew I had to share them with you, spoilers or not. The descriptions are just too rich and hot and dirty to keep to myself.

Fortunately, I can set them up for you without giving away too much of the surrounding plot; and to anyone who knows much about hypnosis, it's obvious almost from the first that the protagonist is being unwittingly subjected to it. The question for me, not having finished the book yet, is whether he's really free after this scene, or whether he only thinks he's free. A little later, someone reassures him that they couldn't implant false memories in him because "That kind of thing would make you such an expensive model that no one here could afford you" - which is a very provocative statement, in my opinion (And just for the record, I absolutely do not trust the person who told him this). Also, considering how much more important hypnosis is in Authority than in Annihilation, I expect it to be a crucial plot point in the final book. Which, again, I'm biting my nails while waiting for.

But on to the quotes. Here's a setup with as few spoilers as I can manage. If a few is too many for you, bail out while you have a chance - but IMO this is a safe enough read.

The protagonist, ironically nicknamed "Control," is an operative for the organization that manages the Southern Reach. He only ever talks to his handler via cell phone, and his handler's voice is masked so that Control doesn't even know whether he's talking to a man or a woman. He just calls that person the Voice. Well, as I implied, the Voice has been manipulating Control with hypnosis; but Control stumbled across a list of hypnotic triggers someone else had written, and he realized the Voice was using those triggers on him. Below is his retaliation. First I'll give you the scene where he zaps the Voice. Then I'll give you the flashback that shows what went on behind the scenes.

---

First thing Saturday morning, Control had called the Voice, from his house. He had placed an electronic bullhorn rigged with a timer on one side of his desk, set the timer. He had placed a neon orange sheet of paper with his reminders on it to the right, along with a pen. He drank a shot of whiskey. He smashed his fists down on the desk, once, twice, three times. He took a deep breath. Then he made the call, putting the Voice on speakerphone....

"Is your house in order?" the Voice asked....

Deep breath. Then, preempting anything the Voice might say, Control launched into a shouted string of obscenities of the most vile kind, contorting his throat, hurting it. After a surprised pause, the Voice shouted  "Enough!" then muttered something long and quivery and curling. Control lost the thread. The bullhorn went off. Control shook himself out of it, read the words on the orange sheet of paper. Checked off the first line. Launched again into a string of obscenities. "Enough!" Again, persistent, stubborn, the Voice muttered something, this time moist and short and darting. Control floated and forgot. The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. Checked off the second line. Obscenities. Mutters. Floating. Bullhorn ripping through. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. Check mark. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Fifth time. Sixth time. The seventh time the script changed. He fed back to the Voice all the muttering, glottal moist soft words he'd gleaned from the director's cheat sheet. Heard the wet gasp and shriek of hitting the target, then an awkward lunge of words toward him, but feeble, disconnected, unintelligible.

That had left a scar. He doubted his incantation had had the full effect, but the point was that the Voice knew and had had a very unpleasant experience.

The bullhorn went off. Control saw the words on the orange sheet of paper. He was done. The Voice was done. They'd have to get another handler, one not quite so manipulative.

"Here's a joke for you," Control said. "What's the difference between a magician and a spy?" Then he hung up.

---

He had reviewed the surveillance of his Wednesday and Thursday conversations with the Voice on Friday night after a vigorous jog. He'd been suspicious, hadn't trusted the way he seemed to fade in and out during those conversations, or how the Voice had infiltrated his thoughts. With [his cat] on his lap, and the feed piped in from his phone to the television, Control had seen the Voice execute hypnotic commands, seen himself become unfocused, head floating a bit on his neck, eyelids fluttering, while the Voice, never dropping the metallic, guttural disguise, gave him orders and suggestions....

The Voice, while Control languished under hypnosis, had a sharpness and focus not as present otherwise, and a kind of casual perversity, telling Control s/he wanted a joke to end their next phone call, "one with a punch line." As far as he could tell, he also had been serving as a living tape recorder for the Voice. The Voice had pulled out of Control verbatim conversations, which explained why he had been so late getting home Wednesday even though the conversation had seemed short....

So he'd written on the neon orange sheet that he could not possibly miss:

CONTROL, YOU ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO HYPNOTIC SUGGESTION BY THE VOICE
_____Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.
_____Check this line and scream obscenities. Move down one line.

Rinse, repeat, brought out of it by the bullhorn, pulled back into it. Until, finally, he reached the end: "Check this line and repeat these phrases" -- all of the phrases he'd found in the director's desk. Shout them, actually.

---

So tell me now, dear readers: wasn't that worth a bit of spoilage? 

brain dump

There's been a lot going on in my head lately, some of which will interest you and some of which will not. I'll stick to the stuff that will interest you, but bear with me if this post veers too far into stream-of-consciousness.

1. One of my favorite fetish artists, Hajime Sorayama, has a new book of art on the market; and he also has a bunch of fantastic new paintings on his Facebook page. Go have a look.

2. I'm still working on my Choose Your Own Adventure story, which will be called "What Do You Give the Alien Who Has Everything?" It's a lot of fun to write, but also very challenging, and this sucker is going to be huge when it's done. I mean really, seriously huge. That's the nature of the CYOA beast. Anyway, I still need two or three beta readers, but the size of the book means I need to give bigger thank-you gifts to those who accept the challenge. Here's the new plan: volunteers (chosen on a first-come, first-served basis) will receive a free final version of the e-book, another free e-book (either one I've already published or an IOU for one I haven't published yet), and a choice of personalized Easter eggs to be embedded in the CYOA. If this interests you, just keep the idea tucked away in your brain for now. I'll keep posting updates until I reach the end of the draft stage, at which point I'll ask for volunteers.

3. Back in March I blogged about a weird/cool/MC-themed book called Annihilation, the first in a trilogy that I couldn't wait to read in full. I said that the author, Jeff Vandermeer, had already written books 2 and 3 and would be releasing them in the coming months; and that I planned to pick them up right away because Annihilation was that damn good. Sadly, I've only just picked up Book 2 (Authority) today. All I can tell you so far is that it's off to an excellent out-of-left field start. In the very first chapter, you get the kind of huge revelations you'd normally expect to find at the end of the third book in a trilogy - which, of course, means there must be dozens of bigger revelations down the pike that I don't even know enough to anticipate yet. This is very exciting. Also, thanks to the wonders of e-book technology, I can search back through Book 1 for words like "control" and "thistle" and even "breakfast" and see how Vandermeer was planting seeds (another of his clue-words) in Book 1 for ideas he develops in Book 2 - and presumably develops further in Book 3.

That's the advantage of writing your whole epic before you publish the first part: you have the control (hah) to do precisely this sort of seed planting. It's a major reason I didn't start posting Sleepwalkers online until I was near the finish line, but you can also chalk that up to anal retentiveness. Hmm, well, I suppose Vandermeer might be just as anal retentive as me, to do what he did with his Southern Reach trilogy. I have no idea about his personality, but it strikes me that you have to have a certain bloody-minded perfectionism to write that way (J.K. Rowling certainly had it, and look how far it got her. Love or hate the Potterverse, you have to admit she kept total control of a very complicated plot over the course of seven books. David Lynch couldn't even keep control over Twin Peaks for two seasons).

And now I'm struggling not to babble about Authority. The things I've read so far wouldn't count as spoilers to anyone who's read Annihilation, but they'd be huge spoilers to anyone who hasn't, so I'd better keep my mouth shut. I'll just say that Vandermeer has a talent for creating very odd, flawed, and totally believable characters who refuse to fit the molds you want to put them in. I already have a very different opinion of the Southern Reach and the people who run it, especially the new kid on the block who is also the new protagonist on the block: poor, ironically nicknamed "Control." Half of me wants to kick him, and the other half of me wants to hug him. It'll be interesting to see where Vandermeer takes the character.

Some excellent mainstream mind control

art by Jeremy Zerfoss

Have you heard of Annihilation? The book, I mean, not the concept. It's the first in a trilogy (all coming out this year, thank goodness - I don't want to have to wait) by Jeff VanderMeer. I haven't read anything else by him yet, but I've heard great things about him and plan to read more soon - including the second and third books in this series. Annihilation has me totally hooked.

I won't try to give you a "reviewer's review" because I know you're here for the mind control, so let me give you a synopsis with enough spoilers to pique an EMC fetishist's interest.

First, imagine H.P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith living today, in or near Florida. He's writing a fantasy/horror novel set in his neck of the woods - only it's not quite his neck of the woods, because in his story it's been invaded by, um, something from what might be another dimension. The Southern Reach, a mysterious organization that keeps sending expeditions into this place, calls it Area X. Half the people who go into it vanish or die, and the ones who make it out sometimes aren't quite themselves afterwards. And yet people keep going in.

Annihilation is concerned with the twelfth expedition. This time the Southern Reach has chosen four women identified only by their roles: the biologist, the psychologist, and two others (I'll bet you can already guess it's the psychologist who practices mind control, right?). The biologist is the narrator, and since she doesn't know why the Southern Reach picked an all-female team this go-around, we don't know either. It doesn't seem to matter much from a plot standpoint, although it did make me think of Tabico's Blue - and not just because of the gender makeup of the team.

Almost as soon as they hit base camp, the researchers discover a stone tunnel with a spiral staircase that leads down to some unknowable depth below the surface (Notice the spiral. If you read the book, notice all the spirals). When the team explores it, the biologist is quickly infected by some sort of alien spores (Yeah, it's that kind of book. Are you excited yet?) that render her immune to the psychologist's hypnosis. All four of them already knew the psychologist had used hypnosis to keep them calm while crossing the border into Area X, but the biologist is the first to realize how deep their team leader has sunk her claws into them.

As a matter of fact, the control the psychologist exerts over the others is far beyond anything a real-life hypnotist could accomplish. It makes me wonder whether VanderMeer is taking creative license or whether the Southern Reach employs some actual technological and/or supernatural method of mind control, maybe something they picked up in Area X and kept to themselves. It's possible. Like I said, this is just the first book in a trilogy; a lot remains unexplained at the end.

Anyway, the Southern Reach knows a lot more about Area X than it lets on. Take the scene below, where the biologist pretends to be hypnotized along with the others so she can see what the psychologist is up to. You won't understand all of what happens here, but you're not supposed to. Not this early in the story. Just ask yourself why the psychologist has to command her team to keep seeing the structure as if it's made of shell and stone. If it's not made of shell and stone, then what is it really made of? Why don't they see it as it really is right from the beginning? And why doesn't the psychologist want them to see it as it really is?

If you're intrigued by the quote below, you can read the whole first chapter of the book over on io9.

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Then she abruptly stood and said three words: "Consolidation of authority."

Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their eyes unfocused. I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had not noticed the lag. I felt no compulsion whatsoever, but clearly we had been preprogrammed to enter a hypnotic state in response to those words, uttered by the psychologist.

Her demeanor more assertive than just a moment before, the psychologist said, "You will retain a memory of having discussed several options with regard to the tunnel. You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action, and that you felt quite confident about this course of action. You will experience a sensation of calm whenever you think about this decision, and you will remain calm once back inside the tunnel, although you will react to any stimuli as per your training. You will not take undue risks.

"You will continue to see a structure that is made of coquina and stone. You will trust your colleagues completely and feel a continued sense of fellowship with them. When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger a strong feeling that you are doing the right thing, that you are in the right place. When I snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow my directives. You will feel very tired and you will want to retire to your tents to get a good night's sleep before tomorrow's activities. You will not dream. You will not have nightmares."

I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her fingers I took my cue from the actions of the other two. I don't believe the psychologist suspected anything, and I retired to my tent just as the others retired to their tents.