the first book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Alexandre Muñiz

I saw that one of the big names in the interactive fiction community had recently retold the story of the time I axed an IF piece I was working on because some folks in a "wouldn't it be cool if there were a game that..." conversation basically sketched out the entire premise. It wasn't actually that big of a deal, as I had barely started it — and in fact that was why it was so vulnerable to being pre-empted, as I hadn't fleshed out any elements that hadn't come up in that conversation. Had I continued with it, I'm sure that I would have ended up with characters and situations that would have distinguished it from other works with the same premise. But since I hadn't developed them yet, I figured I might as well turn my attention to one of my other ideas, so that the characters, situations, and premise might have a chance of striking the audience as original.

Why did that seem so important? Well, keep in mind that this was over a decade ago — early enough in IF history that some basic ideas hadn't been tried yet and you could therefore pioneer some pretty fundamental things. So when I came up with a high concept of this sort I felt kind of territorial about it. To be beaten to the punch by someone else's finished work was fair enough, but to see an idea I'd been working on show up in a "wouldn't it be cool" thread on Usenet felt like going to the trouble of homesteading a piece of land only to have it snatched up by a speculator who wasn't even going to use it. Especially given that such a thread would wind up being read by something like 90% of the program's eventual audience. It's different when you're dealing with a medium of longer standing, in which you kind of have to accept that everything's been done before and the way you distinguish yourself is through your combination and execution of concepts.

Or at least that's the theory. The reason I bring this up is that in reading this book I had that "oh no" feeling at several points as I recognized elements that were eerily similar to aspects of one of my own big projects of the last while. I didn't toss my work this time, though.

Talisman is the story of a tween girl's pursuit of a lost book that her pseudo uncle used to read to her on his sporadic visits. See, that all by itself makes me hyperventilate a little. I had to keep telling myself, my girl is nothing like this girl — and she isn't! — and that the shape her pursuit takes is nothing like this girl's pursuit — and it isn't! it's kind of the opposite! Throw in the fact that Talisman is set in a sci-fi universe with people sticking coiled telephone cords directly into their skulls and whatnot, and really there's only a tangential similarity... but I still couldn't help but feel like I'd just managed to avoid winding up in an auto wreck. Whew! A couple of inches to the right and— hey, where'd my side mirror go?

All of which is to say that there's a lot of stuff in this book that I don't want to comment on except in the form of that project, so let me instead make just a few scattered points.

First, I guess I should say whether I liked this at all. I did! It's got an interesting and likeable heroine, and I often found that I simultaneously wanted to linger on the page I was on ("what a lovely moment!") and race onward ("...but what's gonna happen next??"), which seems to me as good a definition as any of what constitutes good storytelling. I discovered that this book collects issues #19-21 of the Finder series, which surprised me given that it works very well as a standalone story that happens to be set in a richly drawn alternate world, and while I haven't read any other installments in the series, I feel like this also functioned as a pretty good introduction to it should I elect to continue. I.e., I didn't feel like I was missing anything by not having read #1-18 before reading this. And yet apparently some of what I took to be background filigree holds a great deal of significance to longtime readers! Which in turn seems to me as good a definition as any of what constitutes good serial storytelling.

The art took some getting used to, and I never entirely warmed to the way that McNeil draws people's heads — the girl in the story sometimes looks a little too much like Ziggy — but McNeil makes very good use of the medium, telling the story in ways that play to the strengths of comics. For instance, I liked the bit in which the girl goes to look up something in her favorite book, only to find an empty space on the shelf surrounded by the words "gone," "gone gone gone," and "gone" — in prose we wouldn't see the shelf, and in a movie we wouldn't see what the shelf means to her.

Which brings me to the next thing: Talisman is to a great extent a paean to the book — not to the story, but to the book as a physical object in a world where it has largely been superseded by digital readers (as is beginning to happen in our own world). I was reminded of a report I'd heard on the radio recently about how after their shows bands were doing a brisk business in cassettes, which were sometimes snapped up by kids who had no means of playing them and who would get listenable copies of the songs off the Internet. What the purchasers wanted was some way of physically holding the music they liked — not an advertisement for the music, which is why they didn't just buy a t-shirt, but an object that incarnated the music itself, even in an obsolete format. And... I dunno. I can understand bonding with an object insofar as I've held on to a few things from my own past that I would be irked to find replaced with someone else's copy; there's something to the notion that this is the selfsame copy of Iron Man #174 that I read over and over when I was nine, or that this is the selfsame Starflight box that I plucked off the shelf at the Wherehouse when I was twelve. And, yes, I can remember waiting a year for an album to come out and going to the record store and finally seeing real copies with my own eyes in the New Releases display and picking one up and standing in line and paying for it and owning it; Amazon downloads are relatively anticlimactic. But if I had to pick a side, I'd have to say I'm more the sort of person who doesn't bond with objects. Getting attached to a particular book, for instance? I get mine from the library and give them back when I'm done. And the fact that I still get actual books rather than buying a digital reader has little to do with the sort of "hands-on craving" McNeil discusses in her endnotes. (Twenty years ago I read a physical newspaper every day; now I read the news off my computer screen and don't miss flipping all those pages at all.) Meanwhile, in poking around to find a little more about this series, I learned that McNeil is actually publishing it online now — the last physical issue came out in 2005. O irony!

The last thing I want to talk about is the set of endnotes I mentioned a moment ago. This collection concludes with a page-by-page commentary by McNeil in which she gives the source of every quote in the captions — exactly what I'd hoped to find — but a lot more besides. I guess the fact that DVDs still have commentary tracks indicates that there are people out there who dig stuff like this, and I can certainly understand how an author would be tempted to do this sort of writeup — it's basically the same thing I did with the "Photopia Phaq" back in '98. But these days I feel like that may have been a mistake, and reading these endnotes strengthened that feeling. In them, McNeil points out background elements we may have missed... but there's a reason she put those elements in the background, right? Part of what constitutes literary quality are subtleties that people might not catch until the third re-read, at which point they exclaim, "Wow, every time I read this I find new things in it! What a great book!"... unless they miss them, and therefore think less of the work. These endnotes suggest an anxiety about the latter outcome — the underlying message is, look, see how rich this is, look at the subtleties I put in! Except, of course, when foregrounded like this, they're no longer subtleties. McNeil also tells us what she was thinking of when she wrote each panel ("the pipe smoke comes from Attic Books, a used-and-rare shop close to me"), but that too now strikes me as maybe not the best idea — it encourages readers to view the world of the story the way the author does, as a careful arrangement of references to other works and her own experience, rather than as a freestanding world of its own. To which a postmodernist might reply, great! It's not a freestanding world of its own! And years ago I would have been in this camp too. Now I'm not so sure.

The real eyebrow-raiser for me came when McNeil tells us what we're supposed to think about how the characters are behaving! For instance, one is a jerk, but in the endnotes McNeil insists, "This attitude is not really cruelty. Lynne's way of dealing with Marcie will get her up and out of her slough of despond and into action faster than anything else." Well... maybe McNeil should have put something in the story to make me agree, then? I came away from this thinking of that exchange between Douglas Adams and a reader who asked him to provide some commentary on Life, the Universe and Everything: what's the message? Adams replied: "If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book." McNeil wrote both!

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