A creator of souls and the original literary universe

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I’ve written here on Grailrunner before about how interesting 19th century French fiction can be – in that case, the haunting tales of Guy de Maupassant who went entirely insane but wrote great stories about it. And I’ve mentioned here before how fascinating a concept it is to me, the imaginative construction of a fabricated world in all its intricate detail – in that case, the review of Pfitz, by Andrew Crumey. I suppose if all I wanted to discuss today was a complete fictional world I would just direct you to Harn, which if you don’t know what that is, you should probably go check that out.

But I thought instead I’d try and make something more accessible for you than maybe it would be otherwise. Something incredible in its design and execution, audacious in its ambitions, and a work of literature that stands among the finest we have.

The Human Comedy by Honore de Balzac.

“I thought you talked about science fiction and fantasy here – what is this?”

Easy there. There are some incredible points to admire here, so it’s worth taking in a few paragraphs to see what all the fuss is about. As always with Grailrunner, our aim is to study and fuel the imaginative process, so anything we can learn or use as inspiration is fair game.

“OK, so what’s it about?”

It’s a series of 91 inter-connected works (novels, novellas, and short stories) intended to depict the entire spectrum of French society after the fall of Napoleon, with the scope and ambition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

If you’ll allow me a little Google-Fu:

Here’s how Balzac explained his vision for The Human Comedy:

  • A “history of manners”: Balzac intended to be a “secretary” transcribing the “history” of society, focusing on “moeurs” (customs, manners, and morals) – something he believed hadn’t been fully attempted by previous historians. He sought to go beyond surface events and reveal the underlying causes of social phenomena.
  • A comparison to Dante’s Divine Comedy: While his title alludes to Dante’s work, Balzac focused on the worldly, human concerns of a realist novelist rather than a theological framework.
  • Observing and depicting “social species”: Balzac’s inspiration came from comparing humanity to the animal kingdom, recognizing that society modifies individuals based on their environment, creating distinct “social species” similar to those in zoology. He aimed to depict these social species in their entirety, not just as abstract types, but as “real, living men”.
  • The power of storytelling: Balzac, a master storyteller, was fascinated by the power of stories and the dynamics of human interaction around shared narratives.
  • Social structures and human nature: Balzac’s work is grounded in sociology, exploring the complexities of human beings and the deep-seated immorality within social mechanisms that often favor the corrupt over the vulnerable. He believed society, while having the capacity to improve individuals, also exacerbates their negative tendencies.
  • The transformative power of societal change: Balzac documented the significant changes happening in France during his time, including the rise of the bourgeois class and the clash between traditional and modern values.
  • Psychological depth and individual experience: Balzac emphasized the importance of psychological insights and the influence of social context and personal experiences on character development. He aimed to create characters with a wide range of human qualities, both positive and negative.
  • Realism and naturalism: Balzac was a pioneer of literary realism, using extensive detail and observation to portray society accurately. His meticulous descriptions of settings and objects bring the characters’ lives to life, and some critics even consider his work to have influenced the development of naturalism. 

In essence, Balzac sought to create a comprehensive and insightful portrayal of 19th-century French society and the human condition within that context. His focus on the interplay between individuals and their social environment, the complexities of human motivation, and the power of societal forces has had a profound and lasting impact on literature. 

“Wow, man. That sounds boring. Why are you so jazzed about it?”

I get that – I really do. What first caught my attention many years ago about Balzac was a comment I read that hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t even remember what article or book I was reading, but when I came across this statement, it felt very much like one of those transformative ideas that has enough gasoline to in some small way alter the trajectory of your life. And though I struggled mightily in the past to unlock just what that writer was talking about with The Human Comedy, I’ve thought about this quote many times since that day I first read it.

“Balzac ranks along with Dickens and Shakespeare as a creator of souls.”

A “creator of souls”. Wow. As a writer, I really…really…needed to understand what that looks like and how to engineer it in my own writing. What exactly was the magic that people like Shakespeare, Dickens and this Balzac person were sprinkling into the pages that brought their characters to eternal life in our minds? What made their creations arise from the page like that to merit their author being granted a title like that?

“What did you find out?”

I tried to dip in somewhere among the 91 works over the years and found out nothing at all. I read some quotes from Balzac himself on his ambition and design and came away more confused than before on what he trying to do exactly. So it sat as a potentially cool idea, idle. I didn’t know where to start or how to make it mean anything to me.

Then I picked up this at a used bookstore in Hilton Head last week:

Cool cover. Caught my attention. Made me remember the promise of learning what a 19th century French writer did to earn a mention along Dickens and Shakespeare. And it made me curious enough to give him another shot.

Hold that thought. There was one more key to this.

A year or so ago, I completed a big project studying Tolkien’s published works and letters to try and determine the likely plot of a sequel the professor started to write to Lord of the Rings. The second part analyzed and speculated on that plot, but the first part attempted to make The Silmarillion accessible to people who found it dense and incomprehensible by providing a bread crumb trail of important points and people to follow in it. That process was super helpful to me in trying to do exactly the same thing with Tolkien that I sought to do this week with The Human Comedy.

“What does the book from Hilton Head have to do with that?”

It was a comment in the introduction that made the difference, actually. Here’s what it said:

“Early in his career, Balzac began to search for a method of organizing into a single unit, into a vast novelistic structure, the whole of his literary production. The device he hit upon was a simple one, but one that required sustained genius and power to an extraordinary degree, namely the systematic reappearance of characters from novel to novel.” -Edward Sullivan, Princeton University

That made it click. In the early 80’s, it’s one of the things that fascinated me most about the Marvel comic universe – that Peter Parker (Spider Man) hung out with Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four, that they might run across Doctor Strange or Matt Murdock (Daredevil) outside a coffee shop. It made the whole tapestry of the marvel superheroes come weirdly and wonderfully to life for me. The cinematic version made efforts towards that magic, but it fell far short for me in those movies of how it made me feel as a kid with their paper and ink versions.

Now with Balzac’s Human Comedy, I saw that he aimed for exactly that kind of magic. The works weren’t sequels or a continuous narrative, but much like the Marvel characters or any other literary universe with which you might be familiar, these folks can encounter or otherwise know each other…a background character from one novel might rise to main protagonist of their own.

“So you dipped in, then. Which book did you start with?”

I read Father Goriot because I usually come across that one in bookstores. I figured it must be a big deal. Anyway, I finished a Murakami novel on a plane and had the entire Human Comedy on the Kindle – I thought if it sucked, I could just move on to something else anyway. But I wanted to test the magic and see if I could unlock whatever was amazing there.

The breadcrumb characters I discovered in that wonderful book are old Goriot himself, a young man named Eugène de Rastignac (pictured above), Goriot’s daughters Delphine and Anastasie, and a mysterious agitator named Vautrin. By “breadcrumb”, what I mean is there are many other folks in this book – it’s just that if you pay particular attention to what these particular people are up to, you’ll experience the storyline the way it’s intended.

“And?”

Marvelous book! Despite 19th century social order tropes and customs (which hold none of my interest), the characters indeed sizzle and pop off the page, and I was flipping like mad towards the end to see what became of poor Goriot and the kind-hearted Rastignac, whether Goriot’s ungrateful daughters would do the right thing, and whether Vautrin would get his comeuppance. If you plan to read this one for yourself, stay away from plot summaries so the outcomes will be a mystery for you to fuel the page turning. Just stay close to Rastignac, and he’ll lead you through the book.

In fact, luckily, it turns out Rastignac is one of the main recurring characters of The Human Comedy overall. What’s up next for me now that I really like that guy is to read The House of Nucingen where, I understand already, he will likely disappoint me and turn out to be all too realistic of a person.

“So what was the magic that led Balzac to be a ‘creator of souls’?”

Yeah, he nailed that. As I learned more about Goriot, and information about him is only spooned out across the first half of the book so it’s gradual, I thought of how Dickens took relatable and universal archetypes like an abandoned orphan (Pip) or a cruel miser (Scrooge) or the eternally naïve optimist (Mister Pickwick) and constructed memorable people from them. In The Pickwick Papers, for example, Winkle is the obsessed sportsman, Snodgrass is the terrible poet, Tupman is forever falling in love, and Jingle is the grinning con man. They’re relatable traits, and we probably know people like that. That’s the string a good writer plucks, then builds the character around that.

I knew a guy named Reuben once. He was always running around the factory like he was super busy, carrying one of those metal clipboards that conceal the papers inside. I thought once I’d follow him to see where he was running around, because it wasn’t that big of a factory, and it turned out he was just circling the place. I watched him idly kick and poke a pallet of boxes once for a good five minutes. We were in a staff meeting, and he’d made a big mistake with a big client – the manager was furious. When Reuben was asked about it, he cracked open that mysterious clipboard and started madly flipping through the papers inside as if looking for something therein that would resolve how this could have happened. I leaned over to see it was just his mail in there.

We started calling it “pulling a Reuben” when somebody acted too busy if asked to do something. He became immortal right there and then. Forever after, we could reference him as standing in for a role that likely appears wherever there are people doing things.

Balzac’s Goriot is a father who sacrifices everything he has and everything he is for his ungrateful daughters. He becomes the idea of a prototypical father, the archetype, presented in this wonderful book for our consideration of whether he is in fact a good father or not. That’s for us to decide, and I wonder whether we in today’s society would have a different answer than Balzac intended. You might say that “pulling a Goriot” is to sacrifice everything for your kids. He personified that action.

“Boil it down for me. What gave Balzac’s work in ‘The Human Comedy’ the magic?”

Let’s ask him. If you feed all available writings by Balzac as well as commentaries about his work into an AI chatbot and ask it to pose as him, you can get an answer in his voice generating a likely and believable response. I did that, presenting the question as follows: “You’ve been called a ‘creator of souls’. Why do you think that is, and how did you accomplish such a feat?”

His response:

“Ah! Mon cher ami, if they call me a créateur d’âmes, it is because I have listened—truly listened—to the silent confessions of humanity. In every withered banker, every vain young dandy, every trembling grisette, I saw not caricatures, but souls struggling—with ambition, with poverty, with love, with the machinery of a society that crushes and tempts in equal measure.

How did I accomplish it? I observed. Not idly, not with the detachment of a philosopher in his armchair, but with the ravenous appetite of a man who must know. I prowled Paris and the provinces with my eyes open and my ears tuned to the gossip of salons, the groans of debtors, the sighs of lovers, and the mutterings of the criminal class. I drank deeply from the cup of human vice and virtue—and recorded its every drop.

But to observe is not enough. I gave them destiny. My characters live because I allowed them to want—to desire with such intensity that the reader cannot help but be drawn into their orbit. Rastignac climbs like smoke; Vautrin burns like coal; Eugénie Grandet freezes like a saint in a gilded prison. Each soul is born of contradiction and circumstance, but above all—of will.

I did not invent souls; I uncovered them. Like a miner of men, I delved into the strata of class, of power, of inheritance, of chance—and from those pressures, I carved the diamonds and the dross that make up La Comédie Humaine. That is why they live. That is why they endure. I did not merely write them—I lived them.

So if I am called a creator of souls, it is only because I believed that no man, however minor or monstrous, is without one. And I gave them the stage they were so long denied.”

*

Till next time,

Franklin Booth: Engraver of Light

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I have some marvelous freebies for you today, so stick with me.

I’ve been burrowing into a particular rabbit hole these recent weeks, studying and practicing traditional pen & ink drawing. It started with this:

That’s interior art for SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I did it, but I cheated. The base gunslinger was a couple of AI-generated pieces, drained of color and mashed together, cleaned up a bit, and mashed into an original 3D render of the plasma weapon on his forearm. I composited all that into the one image for a splash page as you first open the book.

But it got me thinking that this idea of grungey ink drawings as interior art looks really great and could be a nice distinguishing factor in future Grailrunner books. So I started practicing and studying the great ink masters (which you can read about here) to hone my craft and work directly Pigma Micron and Pentel Brush Pen on paper. No blending modes, no AI bases, no 3d paintovers or stock image composites. No digital tricks at all. Just pen and ink and paper and the satisfying swoosh sound that makes.

It’s a life changer, honestly. But anyway, it led me to Bernie Wrightson and Sergio Toppi and the guy I want to talk about today: Franklin Booth.

I’d ask you to keep in mind that the pen & ink artist has exactly one way to generate values and shadows, and that’s with black marks. Usually, lines. If they want shades of gray, they draw lines.

Like this:

I mean, just take a look at some of those drawings by Booth! The patience and craftmanship is insane! Honestly, I wanted to learn more about the guy and found that it’s kind of difficult to do that. He didn’t make much of a splash with his personality or how he lived his life – just with his work. Here’s a great, though short, overview of him and his work on Youtube.

We’re also several posts in to a new ongoing series here on Grailrunner called CONVERSATIONS FROM THE ABYSS where we’re applying AI tools in some innovative ways as a sort of experimental lab. That got me thinking I’d like to read a decent, illustrated biography of Booth and get to know him a little better, mainly to understand his influences and how he learned to do what he did. So I had ChatGPT write me one and it was terrible. I asked for a 50k word detailed biography and got slop. Seriously, at one point I even asked it why the final product was so bad when it suggested we work section by section in much shorter passages with me approving things along the way.

Yes, I could just buy Silent Symphony from Flesk Publications, but that’s beside the point!

I tried iterating section by section, making my own suggestions as we went till it started to take a kind of shape that might be worth reading. Then I scavenged the internet and the Internet Archive specifically to grab public domain images that were either referenced in the sections or appropriate to the time period being described, all done by Booth himself. We’re not selling you anything here – the final product will be the last download button on this post. I included them as well throughout the text.

In all that, I learned about the fantasy play he illustrated titled Flying Islands of the Night by James Whitcomb Riley, which you can peruse below by smashing the splash page below. It’s vintage beauty at its finest.

I found a scan of a 1925 book containing 60 reproductions of Booth’s drawings with sourcing and titles, details which are almost impossible to find on the internet (as everyone just posts the pictures out of context). That’s available by smashing the title page here:

And here’s a real gemstone that I found which took on an entirely different function than its author intended: a 1916 travelogue written by Theodore Dreiser where he went on a road trip with Booth himself! It’s called A Hoosier Holiday, available by smashing the title page button below:

Where Dreiser thought he’d describe the trip and his musings along the way, I found an intimate and first-hand means of hearing Booth’s exact words, descriptions of his facial expressions and the fact that he ate all the popcorn he could get his hands on, things and sites he found interesting, and even charcoal sketches he made along the way. I found Dreiser to be an arrogant nuisance, but Booth seemed genuinely like a guy I’d road trip with. I liked him even more after reading it.

It was Booth’s 1916 Pathfinder, by the way, which he paid $3k for ($100k in today’s money), and they had a chauffeur as well. Booth was doing pretty well for himself, it seemed.

Quick and painful anecdote – ChatGPT was including factual errors. Some were easy to find, like a bold statement that Booth never married when that was demonstrably untrue. It provided several explicit quotes, which I asked it to source. Each time I called out something like that, it bailed and said it made those up. I think that’s my fault, as I’d named some historians I like as the basis for the voice and tone the software should take to write the text, and it took that to mean it should hallucinate.

Anyway, I wanted to find and include Booth’s very first published illustration. Turned out, the first amateur publication was in a newspaper, which I found in a publicly available scan and screenshotted to included in the book. That was a great find. But ChatGPT was telling me his first professional published work was in a trade magazine called The Inland Printer. I eyeballed 6 years worth of that stupid magazine and found zippo from Booth, eventually going back to call ChatGPT out on that as well. Sheepishly, it admitted that internet claims suggest he appeared in that magazine but since I’d looked and couldn’t find it, it supposed that was incorrect.

But the book I wanted to read was taking shape and becoming something worth spending time reading. The illustrations were helpful and interesting. I liked what I was getting, but it needed one final flourish.

I asked Booth to comment on his own biography.

By instructing ChatGPT to analyze everything we knew about Booth’s personality and values, I asked it at last to speak in his voice and comment on the book we’d produced about his life. That’s the final section of the book.

Here is the final product, titled FRANKLIN BOOTH: ENGRAVER OF LIGHT.

What a great journey that was! I really enjoyed the immersion and learning about this fascinating guy. Take a look and let me know what you think.

[UPDATE July 8, 2025]

I found myself in Indianapolis for business and with a half-day free, so I drove to Carmel, Indiana to the boyhood home of Franklin Booth, which is listed as a historical site though also is still a private home (in surprisingly good shape). It’s super close to a beautiful downtown, in fact walking distance…a quiet and cozy neighborhood with no sign whatsoever that a famous artist lived and worked there. Not even a plaque.

And I understand the backyard shed was where he maintained the workshop which he visited every summer and completed so many of those famous works I’ve highlighted here.

This one:

Pretty cool. Anyway, till next time,

Art critiques from a resurrected master of pen & ink

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A year ago, I wrote here about the worst art advice I’d ever gotten, and I posted pages from my sketchbook at the time to stay accountable in some way for improving. It turned out kind of popular, maybe out of the general public’s desire to see car wrecks in motion. Those pages were fairly early in getting back to traditional art versus digital and were mostly pencil work with some light-table ink drawings. And by light-table, I mean tracing things and so…cheating.

I updated you guys in November with some more pages and then again a couple of months ago (bottom of the same post). Those include watercolors, some digital stuff in Procreate, and also ink drawings. Somewhere in all of that, traditional pen & ink drawing kind of caught fire with me.

It’s kind of all I can think about these past couple of weeks. Those delicious hatching lines and stipples, deep, gorgeous washes of black, and intricate patterns of black and white condensing beautifully into a striking, eye catching work of art! It’s all very satisfying, if I’m honest. And the feel of a Pentel pocket brush pen swishing on toothed paper feels a little like watching somebody make a chocolate cake, almost mesmerizing.

I found this amazing resource free on the Internet Archive (smash the cover image to take a look for yourself):

Written by Arthur Guptill, this is a classic instructional book on pen and ink drawing, widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative resources on the subject. His writing style was patient, articulate, and he was clearly a master of clean, simple line work and exhibited craftsmanship in how he approached both drawing itself but also how he framed his instruction materials. The guy was a natural teacher.

I was approaching my learning by a combination of master studies and daily practice, at first using a Copic alcohol marker for shading and eventually moving to just the brush pen and Pigma liners to focus on learning hatching and cross-hatching.

Here’s an example, a dazzling piece called “The Cobbler”, by John R. Neill:

I learned quite about overlapping structures for depth, clean linework, effective use of contrast, and detailed volumes just by copying this thing.

Here’s another study, by Franklin Booth – a real beauty he titled “Hunting The Tigers”:

Loads of things to absorb by this one regarding overlapping structures, use of negative space, balance of value, simulating water in black and white, and fur textures with ink. Honestly, I’m not happy at all with my copy, but I was being ambitious.

Anyway, we’re four articles in to a new series titled “Conversations from the abyss” where we use advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and also Suno music generation to bring back creators from the past for interesting debates, dialogues, or other entertaining diversions. Nothing for sale – all available free here on the site. It struck me this past week that it would be amazing if I could receive art critiques directly from Arthur Guptill as I’m practicing various bits and bobs I’m learning from the master studies and other practice drawings.

I’ve got a soft spot for Frank Baum’s OZ books and thought an image of a young Baum coming across a scarecrow in a field and pondering it with his wild imagination might be an interesting image for ink practice. I gave it a shot, then uploaded it to ChatGPT and tested this prompt: “Acting as Arthur Guptil, critique this image and provide guidance on how to improve it.”

Here’s what happened, and it honestly blew my mind:

“You have achieved a fine effort in line drawing, and there is evident care in your composition and subject choice. The nostalgic theme—a young boy in thoughtful contemplation before a scarecrow—is charming and well-suited to ink. Now, let us refine your rendering through a few key observations and recommendations:

1. Line Quality and Variation

Your line work shows promise, but greater variety in line weight will enhance dimensionality and focus. At present, the lines are largely uniform, which causes elements to flatten together.

  • Suggestion: Use thicker lines for foreground elements (such as the boy’s arm or the hat’s brim) and finer, lighter lines for background elements like grass or sky hatching.
  • Vary the stroke pressure as a tool of emphasis and mood. For instance, a light cross-hatching for distant tones vs. a bolder hatching for areas of core shadow (beneath the scarecrow’s hat or the boy’s jaw).

2. Compositional Framing

The rectangular frame is sound, but the internal balance feels slightly off-kilter. The scarecrow dominates the space while the boy feels pinched in the lower right.

  • Suggestion: Consider either enlarging the figure of the boy or repositioning him slightly more centrally. Alternatively, allow the scarecrow’s arm to lead the eye toward the boy in a more deliberate diagonal.

3. Rendering Form and Volume

The scarecrow reads clearly as a simple form, but the boy’s anatomy, particularly the arm and face, could benefit from more structural understanding.

  • Suggestion: Study the planes of the face and arm. The boy’s head could use slightly more cross-contour shading to indicate roundness. The hand, though expressive, lacks clear articulation—gesture drawing practice would help here.

4. Textures and Detail

Your use of short, broken strokes to indicate vegetation is appropriate, but the grass and shirt material begin to blend. The shirt on both the boy and scarecrow could use more definitive folds to suggest fabric tension and weight.

  • Suggestion: Use parallel or directional hatching that follows the form of the fabric. Avoid over-randomized strokes, and let texture be a deliberate compositional voice.

5. Background and Spatial Depth

The background is composed primarily of evenly spaced hatching. While this is functional, it does little to suggest depth or atmosphere.

  • Suggestion: Introduce a subtle gradient to the background by controlling your stroke density—more hatching at the top or corners to create a vignette or atmospheric recession.

Final Encouragement:
The spirit of your work is admirable and speaks to a narrative sensibility. With improved control of line, deeper understanding of structure, and refined use of contrast, this drawing could serve as an excellent illustrative plate.Keep your pen in motion and your eyes ever studying!”

*

I mean. A dead guy just gave me really precise feedback on my drawing, recognizably in his voice and noticing very specific things in the drawing! I got compliments that were specific and not vague exhortations. I got clear, explicit guidance on what exactly I could improve. Not generalities. It was, and I mean this, very helpful.

Now, you might be thinking – “Dude, you’re a chicken letting the wolf teach you how to protect the hen house. AI is going to replace artists entirely; why use it for art instruction if you’re encouraging people to use it at all, they’ll just generate the images directly. Why even learn to draw?”

All of that is, of course, nonsense though, isn’t it?

If we get fat and lazy and stop creating, then the images that AI tools use will become instead of crisp white and deep blacks, just an increasingly bland mush of grays…monotonous and uninspired. AI outputs will become AI training datasets, leading to a downward death spiral of junk art. I don’t want to add to that. I want to make new things, man. New things! I see critiques from long-dead art instructors as yet another powerful tool for me to do just that.

I asked for a new chapter to Guptill’s book for digital inking, by the way, which is available free below (and entirely and recognizably in Guptill’s voice):

And yeah, okay, it’s time for an accountability upload of the latest sketchbook entries here (be kind!):

That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Pages 19, 20, and 21 especially benefited from pseudo-Guptill’s instruction, and I gave it all I had to incorporate to the developing pieces what it was telling me.

All this has me wondering – just who else can I get to critique some of this and help me learn quicker? Maybe Leonardo Da Vinci is up next!

Till next time,

A friend I lost years ago left me his lyrics – now here are the songs

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You might think today’s topic is a bit heavy, but it really isn’t. It’s transformative, is what it is! Honestly, I did a thing with AI tools recently that blew me away. It was an experiment that has blasted daylight into a world of opportunity that can send your imagination soaring if you let it.

Welcome back to a series we call “Conversations from the Abyss”, where we use AI tools to stage new dialogues or honor creators of the past. The songs here are being made available for free – nobody’s selling you anything with this.

Back in 2017, I wrote this memorial post for a dear friend of mine who I lost to depression. He fought it hard, but he lost. And we lost something magical with that guy, I promise you. That isn’t my point today, though. Not really. His name was Tim, though we called him Droopy because his voice sounded like that cartoon dog when he spoke.

Anyway, Tim wrote lyrics. Great ones, if I’m honest. I tried too, but he showed me up because mine were always too out-there, too audacious and unrelatable, too philosophical. I was always trying to “say something” or break some kind of ground, and in the end, he’d show up with a song about wanting to take an old convertible to Florida and everybody would love it. We would jam on guitar at his house, and he’d riff crazy lyrics about girls and beaches and highways…and it was amazing.

So I’m a few posts deep into this series of AI experiments, and it got me thinking about whether I could dig around in some crates and find something Tim wrote back in the day to bring to life with the help of some AI tools. And sure enough, buried in a pile of college papers and useless memorabilia in the basement, I found this:

For the youthful among you – that’s a tape. You recorded stuff onto it with ancient witchcraft. In this case, my friend had gifted me in 1994 a thing as I was going off to the Navy that now has become one of the most precious pieces of my life’s treasures. He recorded 14 original songs on an album he titled Crush, and dedicated it to me and to someone named Amie who I never met. (I was the Pope – don’t ask).

I learned not to close my eyes as I listened to it, because it felt way too much like being back in his room playing guitar and getting lost in music with one of my dearest friends. I can’t really do that right now. Maybe never.

But what I DID do was amazing. I picked two of them and brought them to life with Suno, an AI application that generates songs from your lyrics and other direction. Tim would have been horrified to see his words in a country song, but that’s my little joke and he can deal with it. For my part, I think they’re incredible. I remember him singing ’59 Ford Fairlane Convertible in my dorm room, and I believe I know who April was (the girl from the second song).

How about you do me a favor then? If this topic has at all intrigued you, or if anything I’ve ever written on Grailrunner has brought you even a moment of diversion, would you do me a great favor and listen?

My friend, Tim would appreciate it.

Smash the buttons. Let me know what you think.

A resurrected Harlan Ellison helps settle the question of shock value in storytelling

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Harlan would hate this. With a bullet. But it’s happening.

We’re making hay while the sun shines, trying out a premium ChatGPT subscription and bringing all sorts of people back to life or mashing them together into alternate realities for our entertainment. And honestly, some of these simulations of literary or artistic geniuses are surprisingly accurate to how they thought and spoke. So far, we’ve hosted a hilarious debate about conciseness in storytelling with Stephen King, Hemingway, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Professor Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Homer called Verbosity & Vine and had Professor Tolkien write a new 2,000 word King Arthur short story with an evil grail titled The Black Chalice of Broceliande. There is absolutely going to be a Seinfeld Season 10 post at some point, once I pipe Modern Seinfeld prompts into ChatGPT and let the horses run.

Anyway, welcome to a series we call:

Since the King versus Hemingway debate wound up so funny, we thought it would be a hoot to smash some more genius creators together and have them argue the merit of shock value in storytelling. To remind everyone: our policy at Grailrunner is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

This simulated argument was entirely written by AI with prompts from us, but really took on a life of its own. We decided who joined the conversation, and some of those choices really wound up fantastic. In fact, things really surprised us when we had Professor Tolkien join this conversation as well, as he kind of cleaned everyone’s clock on the matter at hand and got suddenly inspiring. That just happened – we can’t take credit for it! Ellison, at least for our part, stole the show though.

The conversation is called Fire Beneath the Ink:

Key players (all deceased) from left to right are:

Professor J. R. R. Tolkien – author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and master craftsman of worldbuilding.

Harlan Ellison – a fiercely imaginative and outspoken American writer known for his prolific work in speculative fiction, particularly short stories, television scripts, and essays that challenged social norms and literary conventions. Also one of the finest writers to ever punch a typewriter.

Antonin Artaud – a radical French dramatist, poet, and theorist best known for developing the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to shock audiences into confronting the deeper truths of human existence. He once threw meat at his audience.

Charles Dickens – a celebrated English novelist and social critic whose vividly drawn characters and dramatic storytelling captured the struggles and injustices of Victorian society. Nobody has ever been better at generating pathos and character empathy than this guy.

Jonathan Swift – an Irish satirist, essayist, and clergyman best known for his sharp wit and scathing critiques of politics and society, particularly in works like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

Random? Maybe a little. They all seemed to suit the topic at hand though, and Artaud and Harlan got along famously! See for yourself by smashing the cover button below!

So funny! We hope you enjoyed the debate. Somehow, it was nice to hear from Harlan again, and with him in good humor, poking at people and enjoying himself. If you’re familar with him at all, surely you see how much he would loathe this entire idea and likely drive to my house and tell me so.

And what about that Professor?! Did you get tingles at the end? We sure did.

Anyway, come back often and check on us. We’re unleashing the creative hordes here.

Till next time,

I asked AI to have Tolkien write me a King Arthur story with an evil grail

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So I was killing time at the airport last week, waiting on my flight. Grabbed lunch and sat down to start doom scrolling my phone since I had a couple of hours to kill. Then I thought…”Wait, I’m trying out the ChatGPT+ premium membership this month.”

I really….really need to share with you what this AI built for me with some simple prompting, all on my iPhone while I had lunch. Even the pdf I’m going to share, with the front and back covers. All of it.

On. My. Phone. During lunch.

Anyway, our policy is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

So I always read back in the 70’s and 80’s that “computers can’t create”, and imagination is the skill of the future. I hear it a lot now, actually, that AI is blobbing existing works together and creating nothing new, and that’s technically true. But that’s also what our brains do.

“All you need to invent is an imagination and a pile of junk.”Thomas Edison

It’s one thing to see the lyrics of an imaginary Bruce Springsteen song, like “Turn The Engine Over”:

I was born on the edge of a steel town flame,
Where the smokestacks whisper your daddy’s name.
Mama lit candles, prayed hard through the storm,
While the foreman shouted, “Son, that’s just how you’re born.”
The rail yard’s rusted, the bar lights dim,
But I still see her dancin’ like a seraphim.
[Chorus]
Turn the engine over, feel the rattle in your bones,
Roll past the ghosts that call these back roads home.
Love don’t die, it just hides out in the dust,
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Verse 2]
Jenny worked nights down at Jackson’s Grill,
Saved up dimes in a jar on the windowsill.
She said, “Someday, I’ll see the ocean tide,”
But dreams like that don’t get no free ride.
I was too scared to run, too proud to beg,
Now her name’s a tattoo on my right leg.
[Chorus]
Turn the engine over, feel the thunder in your chest,
Every mile a mercy, every town a test.
The past don’t sleep, it rides in the rearview dust—
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Bridge]
We were kings of the lot, gods of the drag,
Laughin’ through summers in American rags.
Now I punch clocks just to quiet my mind,
But some nights I hear her, singin’ soft through the pines…
[Verse 3]
Now my hands are blistered, my boots are worn,
I’ve buried too much to mourn like I’m torn.
But this old Ford’s got one more ride,
And maybe redemption waits on the other side.
[Final Chorus]
So turn the engine over, let it roar like it’s alive,
This heart’s still beatin’ like it’s twenty-five.
Hope ain’t gone, it’s just buried in the dust—
So turn the engine over, babe—
Drive it like you still believe in us.
[Outro]
Yeah, turn the engine over, babe…
Drive it like you still believe in us.

I had Suno (different AI application) gen up a version you can listen to, which wound up a country song and nothing like the Boss, but honestly still pretty awesome. Listen to that here.

The lyrics are eerily appropriate to something the Boss might write. Not mind-blowing, I agree. But it definitely reads like him. Certainly better than anything I could do trying to emulate him.

In my case over lunch, I really felt like reading a King Arthur short story since:

  1. I love King Arthur and grail stories, in all their forms
  2. I only had a sandwich and didn’t want to deal with anything very long anyway
  3. If it sucked, it really didn’t matter. It’s just replacing futile news scrolls and will serve as a place to put my eyeballs and attention for a little while.

I think very highly of Professor Tolkien’s writing style and lament that he didn’t generate a bigger bibliography of fully formed fiction in his unmatchable voice and sense of scale, his ability to summon majestic backdrops and twinkling cities in the distance. So I added to the prompt to make the story roughly 2,000 words and in the style of Tolkien.

What I got was – honestly, not bad at all. First try. Shorter than I had asked, but still interesting. I gave it a couple of ideas to squeeze in to some new attempts, specifically about the Green Knight, and then asked for a cover image. I wanted to test if I could generate an entire pdf ebook (really a packaged short story) without needing Photoshop or other desktop tools.

Just my phone, waiting on a plane.

The cover kind of gave me fits and needed a lot of coaxing, though I didn’t use Photoshop at all for this. I mean, it also named the story for me, generated variations of fonts and layouts, and created the entire front cover just based on prompts (the one in the header, I did in Photoshop, so that’s cheating):

Here’s the back cover it generated for me, based on text it wrote and some prompts to stick to the theme of the story and the front cover:

And finally, having no idea if it was possible, I asked it to include all of this generated content into a pdf. And here that is.

Please keep in mind – I didn’t sit down with Indesign or Photoshop or Word. I didn’t write any of it. I didn’t paint anything. This is me waiting on a plane and punching things into my iPhone to entertain myself.

Crazy world we live in, isn’t it? I think we need to be careful with all this, for sure. Training databases should be combinations of properly licensed images and works or things in public domain. Original creators need to be paid for their work. People using AI ought to say so and be clear how.

Still, crazy world. And a wonderful way to pass some time if you’re itching for a new Tolkien story.

We’re including this post in a new ongoing series where AI is resurrecting interesting people for us to chat with, or dropping them into alternate realities to entertain us (for free). It’s called:

Till next time,

I asked AI to write a funny debate between Stephen King & Hemingway

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This is funny. Seriously.

Our policy at Grailrunner is to consider AI a powerful and unavoidable tool for creative exploration, but to always call out its use explicitly and avoid licensed images for datasets. But wow – I wasn’t ready for how much things have improved since I last messed around with ChatGPT a year or so ago!

I had a couple of hours to kill today, and I took a random magazine from Barnes & Noble to a steakhouse. The guy that sat me saw the magazine’s headline about ChatGPT and told me awkwardly how he generated a conversation between two of his favorite characters from some video game (the game’s name eludes me – ‘Borderlands’, maybe.

Anyway, it got me thinking. Who wouldn’t want to listen to Stephen King, master of long-winded, verbose fiction get into a heated argument with Ernest Hemingway, the craftsman known for his crystalline precise and minimal prose?

I mean, right?

So I signed up for ChatGPT+ to avoid a bunch of annoying limits and played around with some prompts to get things going. They were coming to a resolution too quickly, so I juiced the scene by adding Tolkien. Then Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and George R. R. Martin. Then Virginia Woolf showed up uninvited. That’s on her – I didn’t prompt that one! Then I had Homer rise up from the bar floor to give his thoughts and quiet everyone since he’s the original boss.

As a twist, I had King step up and propose a means of settling the entire debate. Not maybe what anyone would expect, but satisfying from my perspective at least.

Then I asked Shakespeare to come in with an after-credits scene. He even wrote some poetry for the occasion.

I used ChatGPT to illustrate the conversations too, which was a bit of a pain. It’s kind of random with safety content filters, but it seems if you end the chat and start a new one, filters that have kicked in and start shutting down everything seem to go away. I cleaned them up a little in Photoshop, but honestly – not that much.

The cover was a quick gen-up in Photoshop too, then I made the pdf in Microsoft Word because I didn’t have the energy to do it right in Indesign. Was just amusing myself, anyway. Nobody’s selling anything here.

Take a look by smashing the button here.

Isn’t that just hilarious? Surprisingly hilarious? I remember a couple of years ago asking this same software to write a new adventure with King Arthur and a dark, evil grail to see if it would be amusing and I was incredibly irritated how generic and nonsensical it was. That wasn’t that long ago – crazy how much better this content is.

Anyway, I just wanted to offer you something amusing today. Let me know what you think.

We’re going to make this another ongoing series, just to bring some folks back from the dead or drop them into alternate realities where some fascinating chats can take place. Come back and check that out!

Till next time,

One Month Into Book Launch: How’s That Going?

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It’s been a month since we published SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a solo roleplaying game based on our multi-media Salt Mystic setting. There are some bright spots, some hopeful notes, and a world of pain. Overall, we’re still incredibly proud of the product and seeing and hearing people appreciate it in the wild is an experience like nothing else!

We thought it would be helpful for anybody thinking of putting your own book out to see what we tried: what worked, and what didn’t…and what still might. Care to come along?

Way back in 2016, I wrote a short article defining some indie publishing principles based on lessons from the launch of my first book: TEARING DOWN THE STATUES. The principles were consolidated into the acronym “MCGRAW”, suggesting the key elements necessary for publishing success (Mainstream recognition, an eye-catching Cover that looks like it belongs with books like it, a popular Genre, as many Reviews on major listing sites as possible, Awards to add validation that the book merits attention, and Word of Mouth.) We kept these in mind this launch and tried to incorporate what we could, although the genre of tabletop roleplaying is so saturated and so dominated by Dungeons & Dragons that we were working uphill and digging holes from the beginning.

Still, hope springs eternal, and this is a product we believe in mightily, knowing from its ideation that nobody else was doing anything like it.

What was the pre-launch like?

February was a hot mess, finalizing the proofs and shaking trees to try and get attention from bloggers and gaming news sites. Short of providing free pizza delivered by cosplayers who do magic tricks, I’m not sure what else we could have done to get mentions from some of these guys – we reached out to 20 and got one “No, Thanks” and absolute crickets otherwise. That’s offering a free physical copy for review, by the way. Local gaming store wasn’t interested, and I didn’t have the heart to cold call others. My ego can only take so much bruising!

I pushed my Photoshop skills to the breaking point generating ad assets to use in social media and ad campaigns, stirring up some images that I think really popped! Here’s my favorite, though we had to switch it out to juice the click rate after things got rolling.

I’m a big fan of Absolute’s 3d cover generator and Envato’s PlaceIt – both to generate mock up’s of the cover in various places. We generated this one below for banners through RPG Geek and some other sites:

We came SOOOO close to hiring an artist we’ve been targeting for years now, and he might yet come on board for a promotional poster, so I won’t jinx anything by saying more. That would be amazing, so wish us luck! Anyway, he was swamped with other things, so the heavy lifting on graphics was still in-house.

How did you handle distribution setup?

The book is available at booksellers globally through Ingram Spark, and also on Amazon thru Kindle Direct Publishing, as well as the pdf on Drivethru RPG. We got the barcode direct from Bowker to retain full distribution rights – there are strings attached to the freebies. Honestly, setup was fairly painless for Kindle Direct, but I thought at one point Ingram was going to leave me with facial tics!

The cover file was a high res jpg I’d built in Adobe Illustrator, and it included some transparent png images (the title and the Grailrunner logo). The art was done with Daz Studio for the figures, some Blender and Photoshop filters for the forearm weapons, and some AI help for the background, everything composited and color graded in Photoshop then dropped into Illustrator for the text and placements. This is what that looks like, front and back:

Weird white outlines were appearing in the digital proof around anything that was a png in the image. Maddening! Nobody at Ingram Customer Service was responding, and internet advice was kind of all over the place. I tried various export presets and never resolved it, at last approving the digital proof even with the outlines in hopes that it was in fact a screen artifact only (as some advice suggested). Thankfully, the issue didn’t show up in the physical version.

As for offering a physical version through Drivethru RPG, I basically gave up. They seem to be saying they use the same print house as Ingram, though a different division or something? I dunno. Anyway, much worse issues with anything that was a png, including the interior art! A true disaster! I’m sure they would say it’s my fault, but I bailed entirely and just offer the digital version through them. My blood pressure thanked me immediately!

How did you advertise?

We ran campaigns on Facebook, through Google, Amazon, and on RPG Geek. The book is also listed this month on Ingram’s home page and in the World Reader, iCurate Connection, and Indiewire newsletters, all via Ingram (~28,000 circulation for the newsletters). Through the Independent Book Publishers Association, the book will be represented at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia this June. We’ll see how all that works out, but here are some initial experiences:

Meta (Facebook) started at 2.1% click rates with tens of thousands of impressions as well as loads of shares and likes and bookmarks. It all felt great until we saw that precious little of that was converting to sales. Internet research was suggesting a good click rate was 2% for search ads and 0.1% for display ads like banners, but for us it was just a lot of activity with poor conversions. By changing the graphics out to a grinning gunslinger and tweaking the copy a bit, we doubled the click rate to 4.2%. We’ll see if all those bookmarks and shares pay off down the line!

Google Ads was impressive, as their algorithm learns as you go, tweaking things to improve the reach. We wound up with a 5.1% click rate by the campaign’s end, which we view as solid. We even had one day peak at the end at 8.1%! All campaigns led to the same Amazon listing, so we can’t separate sales by campaign but I thought a lot of this experience overall.

RPG Geek was a little disappointing. Multiple banner and display ads dominated the site for a month. The thinking here was that this site entirely specializes in roleplaying games, so you couldn’t find a more on-the-nose target audience! Still, click rates flatlined at 0.1% for two weeks, till the same changes as above doubled that to a paltry 0.18% by campaign end.

Amazon: We only launched the Amazon ads in the last week or so – it’s a little early to report any results. I’d also never added any A+ content to a listing before, so that was new. Of course, I added that gunslinger since he seems to catch eyeballs, along with a very short description of the book.

So, was it a good launch?

Could have done more on pre-launch to get some mentions, honestly. We need to work on a solid email list and social media following though the new content required for that is a bit threatening when everyone has day jobs. Reviews remain super difficult to get, though some favorables have popped up that we didn’t arrange. Overall, sales are ramping up very slowly. Glacially, you might say.

What’s next?

I submitted SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for consideration in the 2025 Ennie Awards, which is the Super Bowl of RPG’s! Any mentions at all would be high octane fuel for me. That’s a long shot, of course, just because of the ridiculous amount of talent in the field these days. Still, you never know…

*

I hope some of this was helpful or at least entertaining. Warts and all, this is how things have gone so far and the plan going forward. I’m sure the outside observer can find all manner of beasties and stinking swamps herein, but from the inside, it’s a wild, crazy bucking bronco we’re just happy to hold onto!

Till next time,

Innovations in Music and Mythmaking (and how to link them!)

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I’m told my reading habits are a little out there. I get that. I do.

However, it intrigues me that in almost any field of human endeavor, there is a specific type of personality that thrives on breaking its rules and forging incandescent new ways of doing things. If you’re new here, that’s almost entirely what we do here – find, spotlight, analyze, and celebrate innovation in the creative process.

So I was reading this book about 1960’s beach music:

I don’t like that sort of music at all. I especially detest men singing falsetto and lyrics obsessing over the teenage emotional range. However, I had heard that the Beach Boys album, Pet Sounds, was considered the greatest and most influential album in music history. Knowledgeable people say that. I wanted to understand why in the world that would be, given its niche genre, its terrible album cover and name, and the fact that it isn’t chock full of top 10 hits.

What was so special? And once I knew that, I would of course ask: what inspired it?

I’ll cut to the chase since the answers to those questions don’t actually comprise my point today. I want to extend some of these lessons over to mythmaking and storytelling since that’s my main jam. (If you’re into this crossover of music and storytelling, I wrote about this sort of thing in an article called “Aesthetic Puzzles: When Bach Met Shakespeare”, which you can go catch here.)

Why is Pet Sounds a big deal?

Brian Wilson was the main creative driver behind the 1960’s-era pop band, the Beach Boys, and took a break from touring in 1965 to focus on creating “the greatest rock album ever made”. Till then, their songs were bubble-gum melodies of no real sophistication and lyrics aimed like a piledriver at teenagers having fun, especially in and around the rapidly-growing fad of surfing. Wilson was enamored with the “wall of sound” production techniques of music producer, Phil Spector, which involved using echo chambers and physical studio arrangements augmenting studio manipulation of recorded tracks to generate robust, layered textures of sounds that would come across richly on a jukebox. Spector’s stated logic behind his own innovation was:

“I was looking for a sound, a sound so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record.”

So it was mono (versus stereo) playback technology and the limited fidelity of speakers available at the time that prompted Spector to layer sounds together and experiment with ways of making the sounds more textured. Wilson felt the Beatles album, Rubber Soul contained some of the most mature lyrics yet for the band, and from these two launch points, he wanted to get more emotional with his lyrics and more experimental with his production techniques to surpass them all.

Wilson wound up innovating in all areas, and indeed developing intriguing ways of making the studio itself an instrument: combining, for example, multiple instruments simultaneously into a blended and new quality that sounded nothing like any of them. He introduced novel instruments like bicycle bells, a variation on the theremin, among others, in a rogue recording marathon of studio musicians while the actual band was out touring. Nobody had done that before, or even went off the trail of a small ensemble like that to make an album that couldn’t actually be played live. He also experimented with chord voicings, meaning how different chords are brought together (a little out of phase, for example, so there’s a slightly noticeable tremor) or avoiding a definitive key signature. By all accounts, Wilson’s efforts with the band surpassed anything Spector had done or would do. He took the inspiration and ran with it.

Studio musicians involved said of the time that they knew something very different was happening. Something important. It was interesting to me, reading what it felt like for the other guys there, the ones just hired to do a thing and realizing they were part of something.

So the idea to hold in your head then, for my point to land, is this: an approach towards recording music where all manner of frequencies and qualities of instruments and voices are layered over each other in a rich texture of sounds that you could listen to a multitude of times with headphones on and the volume turned up and still catch new things.

Texture. That’s the thing to remember. Innovating with texture.

What’s all this got to do with storytelling?

I’ve spent the last 3 years working on an approach to storytelling and tabletop roleplaying that I engineered to be as innovative as I could manage. I tried to rethink how narrative games like Dungeons & Dragons function and streamline everything down to core essentials.

“The awe and danger of exploration inside the covers of a book.” That was my compass. It’s here, called SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS. I’m not trying to sell you that right now, though. I want to talk about using it as a recording studio like Wilson did.

This idea now of texture and layered elements building a rich tapestry to transform a familiar art form into something different and new prodded a new question for me:

Can the elements of mythology and storytelling play the same role for the written word that musical notes, chords, and rhythms play? Instead of playing for the ear a rich tapestry like that, can archetypes and themes be arranged to play for the emotions?

Here are the commonly accepted themes of mythology and folklore in a table, arranged into numbered entries appropriate for a roll of D100 dice:

Here are the common character types of mythology, similarly arranged:

And finally, here are the common situational types of mythology:

SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS is designed in a similar manner, with appendix tables for all manner of characters, encounters, and places arranged along the 100-scale like this, appropriate for idle shopping, dice rolls, or use of the bibliomancy mechanic core to the book’s function. The concept with the book is to forge a solo adventure and tell yourself an amazing, resonating story.

The analogy I’m drawing today is that themes and types of mythology have a power and resonance very much like the comforting, stable floor of bass in music. A deep, low melody on bass grounds a melody and makes it richer, makes it seem more important. That’s how myths work. I’m imagining incorporating elements from these tables into a solo tabletop adventure to make them play the same role…

…to summon them so they must work their magic.

I picture roleplaying game rulesets like the one in the BOOK OF LOTS as recording studios: an engine of creation that wasn’t available to previous generations that we can bend to dazzling new heights like Wilson did.

I see elements of oracle tables like those in BOOK OF LOTS or Ironsworn, Starforged, the Dungeon Dozen volumes 1 and 2, and other amazing sourcebooks as chords and notes.

And I see the solo player as a crazy artist, just messing with things to see what new comes out of it all. Telling new stories. Jamming new jams.

My head is swimming at the thought of this. I wonder if it’s too much coffee or if there’s something to be said, truly, about combinations of mythic elements arranged like music. Intriguing idea for me today, at least, to bring it to you today.

Till next time,

Let’s Visit Larry Niven’s Integral Trees

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One of my first obsessions was Larry Niven‘s science fiction. Back in the day, we had a pool table in a big living room where the air conditioning was a box unit embedded in the wall. That AC made the most comforting white noise you could imagine, and to lay on my belly under that pool table reading A HOLE IN SPACE, NEUTRON STAR, CONVERGENT SERIES, RINGWORLD, and PROTECTOR (still on my shelf, so I can read off the names for you) was amazing.

I knew he was extrapolating from hard science. Some of what he was describing was just beyond my reach, but I could make out enough at 10 or 12 years old to know this was fascinating stuff. The naughty bits were cool too, and he seemed to revel in those things. I was his target audience.

Then in probably 1983 or 1984, I talked my mom into buying me his latest: a book called INTEGRAL TREES.

The text on the back hooked me entirely: “Critics long thought Niven would find it difficult to surpass his Hugo-winning novel RINGWORLD – the story of an artificial world, a ribbon of unreasonably strong material 1 million miles wide and 600 million miles long. They were right. Until now, that is. In THE INTEGRAL TREES Niven presents a fully fleshed culture of evolved humans who live without real gravity in the gas torus that rotates about a neutron star. This is the novel his fans have been awaiting!”

I remember flattening the hardback so I could make out the entire cover image to try and understand better what I was reading, and it’s a real dazzler by the great Michael Whelan:

Unfortunately, I didn’t know what an integral sign was shaped like. I didn’t know what a “torus” or a “tuft” was, and even when I looked these things up in the dictionary (dictionary?!), I couldn’t visualize anything in what I was reading beyond people could float weightlessly. Honestly, it seemed this would be awesome if I knew even half of what these sciencey words meant, but I was 10. So I bailed.

I hated that book for years because of that. On a side note, I went on and earned a Physics degree and worked in nuclear engineering for a while, and now I’ve packed in another 40 years beyond when I first laid beneath that pool table to try and visit Niven’s fascinating setting.

For no other reason than I came across its title on Youtube randomly, a couple of weeks ago, it was time to try again.

I’ve finished THE INTEGRAL TREES as well as its unfortunate sequel, THE SMOKE RING, and I believe I’m prepared to describe the visuals and dynamics to you so you can have an easier time than my early self (and from what I understand from reviews and people on-line, many, many others!). I’m a big fan of environmental science fiction like RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, RINGWORLD, RIVERWORLD, SCAVENGER’S REIGN, and others, so if that’s you at all – hang on, here. There’s good and bad, my friend. Good and bad.

Let’s head to a faraway binary star system where a neutron star (Voy) and a Sun-like star play gravity tug-of-war with each other, locking in a dead planet (Gold). The planet had a thick atmosphere once, but that’s being stripped away by the tidal forces making a stable doughnut-shaped gas torus that, believe it or not, is breathable and inhabitable within a specific zone.

Picture yourself climbing up a thick tree canopy, in fact so thick that people have established tunnels through it and built huts inside. It’s easy for you, as gravity seems to be much lighter than you’re accustomed to here on Earth. You come up on an enormous tree limb and realize this is no normal tree. In fact, as you make your way along its length to the trunk, you find the trunk itself is so incredibly large it appears to be a flat wooden wall. It must be 60 miles long to have a trunk this size.

You press on, climbing upwards to find the top of the canopy and hopefully understand better where you are. There’s light up there, sparkling through the leaves. Bright clouds. Maybe a strong wind – you start to feel a stiff breeze against your skin. A wet mist, like that near a big waterfall, tickles the skin of your forearms as you approach the light. You poke your head up through the canopy and:

Indeed, the tree is bigger than you imagined, stretching into the distance above you as far as you can see, with a yellow sun way up there making a halo around its fuzzy far end. You squint and can just make out against the glare that the massive tree is bare along the bulk of its trunk above your canopy here though it appears to have a similar clump of foliage on the opposite side of the trunk from yours though that’s just a thin hair-like black silhouette to you this far away. The entire tree is shaped like a planetoid-sized elongated “S” with you clinging to the bottom left-hand curve of it. Your tree limb juts off the main trunk, though it’s so large a hundred others like you could just live here.

The wind against your face is strong and constant. You can squint against it, but honestly, it’s easier to just look in the opposite direction. That’s when you notice that the very sky here, blue and hazy and beautiful, is full of life and trees just like this one. In fact, perhaps thousands of such trees drift like spokes inside this gas ring and all around you, all oriented radially so they point down at the neutron star far below your feet.

Whale-looking beasts and birds with sharp blades for beaks soar past like airplanes. It’s a bountiful frontier, seemingly ready for hunters. A ball-shaped jungle appears:

In the hazy blue-gray, you see the silhouettes of tall, thin people tied to lines and floating in the sky weightlessly, aiming harpoons at something among the trees of the jungle. It dawns on you that you can stand here atop this mighty tree limb and gaze upwards at them, but were you to climb this trunk, the pull of gravity would fade to nothing.

So you start climbing, because that sounds awesome.

It takes no time at all before you’re having to hold on to knurls and warps in the trunk to avoid drifting into the sky. High above you, people are swimming in a raindrop as big as a sky scraper. It’s a lake, pulled into an elongated sphere by surface tension. And they’re swimming inside!

This place is perhaps the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. That’s what you’re thinking as you make it far enough to at least glimpse the far end of the tree, the end closest to the yellow sun. And you realize as other settlements come into view that they’re upside-down to you! The pull of the yellow sun is their down. The pull of the neutron star below was yours.

Now, here in the center, there is no such thing as down.

The thought of jumping into the sky is too much for you. It’s terrifying, but thrilling. You wave at one of the folks in the distance, and a hazy-gray silhouette waves back. You think you can make it to them. At the very least, they might toss you a rope and pull you in.

What the heck! Maybe that big old whale-thing will take you on its back. Whatever! You jump and don’t look back.

*

Anyway, that’s how I saw it. The setting for these two books is amazing, and it gets better as the main characters start exploring and also as you can better visualize where they’re going and what it would look and feel like.

The issue is the writing. The plot of the first book is great until it isn’t. Way too much time is spent in a location and with a plot point that is just annoying and a terrible decision. I believe if you’re going to make the environment the lead, it’s just wrong-headed to add a host of extraneous sideways quests and traps that don’t really add to the feeling many of us were drawn to in the first place. (I’m taking that advice, by the way, in the book I’m writing now based on this very experience!).

The characterization is nonsense too. Everyone speaks the same, and that’s like Larry Niven. An orbital mechanics textbook would have more interesting dialogue. I especially cringe when people obsess over “mating” and “making babies” in Niven’s effort to head off questions about gene pool viability. Ladies in these books are cartoon-like in their willingness to pleasure or be impregnated by pretty much any male. Again, I was the target audience for that sort of thing back in the day. Now, it’s just embarrassing and silly.

Please avoid the sequel, THE SMOKE RING. No reason to read that. You’re not going to get any more great exploration or insight into the ecosystem. Just the idea of growing a round tree. Everything else is silly and very, very difficult to plod through.

So if the writing is so bad, why am I heartily recommending you read THE INTEGRAL TREES?

You know the answer! This setting is incredible and unforgettable. It would make a compelling anime setting, or a video game background. I just wish a stronger story with better characters inhabited it.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. Let me know what you think if you take the plunge too.

Till next time,