Phillip Marlowe, Country Music, and the legacy of Michael Morgan

I admit it, I bounce around. I thought I was further along in thematic development until I saw a though-provoking concert last night. (Forgiveness, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Daniel Bernard Roumain.)

The past couple of days I've been exploring the idea of adding more action, especially stuff that plays with that conceit of Indiana Jones exploits happening in a more-or-less realistic modern world. I have moved the idea forward of Penny finding the concrete bed and a few other bits of the dismantled test site where Freeman was doing the project -- possibly even where MacDonald got injured.

Now I think that's not the direction I should be going.

I was talking about Raymond Chandler style mysteries, where the small mystery opens up into a world of corruption. And this is the mode to address the things that excite me about this book. Not unlikely underground bases or contrived shootouts in ghost towns (I'll save that for the Cleopatra book, anyhow).

Nuclear colonialism. Conspiracy theories as reaction to the essential helplessness of the ordinary person against the military-industrial complex. Duty, honor, and the feeling of belonging to something bigger.

And somewhere deep in there is an image that was already very much in the story. The woman walking across the sand with the child in her arms. That's the White Sands footprints (the woman was probably a teen, the child was walking some of the time, on her hip at other times, and there was some sort of probably loose family group involved. Unlike Lucy, who basically got separated, fell out of a tree and died.)

Yeah, it's that old Terry Pratchett gimmick that I keep trying to get working. Since I started this story -- before I even thought of including Lucy and the Egtveld Girl et al -- I knew it was going to end with Penny walking the Jornada del Muerto towards the Trinity Test Site.

So you climb up three feet and slip back two. I lost the idea of filling some chapters with running around in the desert or with fast cars or who knows what. I gained the first two clues-that-change-the-story-direction moments, from when Penny first asks what this body is doing in her archaeological excavation and tries to get sense out of the NAGPRA contact point for the dig, to when the dig is closed and she's far from White Sands, in a car heading towards Roswell for what will also turn out to be the wrong answers.

Now I just need another four or five hit points and I can make a proper scene plan.

Radiation Leak

I was making progress, really I was. I clarified some structural issues, thinking about B plots and supporting characters and phases.

And at brunch today (recovering from a sick and needed one more day off work to get my strength back) I scribbled the wrong note and it all started going sideways.

The core idea is still nuclear secrets. Set in the White Sands basin, the arid southern New Mexico. And the plot that starts the plot rolling -- the body drop, if you will -- is rooted in the long conflict over ownership of the area, between the nuclear establishment and civilians, between ranchers and the take-over of desert and "The Hill" (Los Alamos) by the military back in the '40s, between Spanish and the new nation and the Pueblo, between the Apache and everyone else.

But I can't leave uranium out. That's part and parcel of the whole story. Not just Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. Navajo uranium miners, the Trinity "Downwinders," remaining contamination and poorly-closed mines, the current highly-contested Waste Isolation Plant project in the lower corner of the state.

And more-or-less simultaneous (that's what note-taking can get like, especially with pauses for that bacon omelet and hash browns with red salsa) I was realizing I needed more "stuff" for my current plan of a through-line "A" plot and B plots (more like C plots) that act like self-contained fetch quests with their own mini-arcs, and that there was so much more fun stuff I can do.

I've got moving parts already in this machine. Jackson and Sanchez -- I think he's CID, now, but he could be almost anything that has an unusual degree of freedom within the military machine. Penny's midnight dig, and the thought of her doing an ill-advised desert hike (which came very strongly to me as I was...doing an ill-advised desert hike).

Can she breach the perimeter more than once? Encounter Jackson and Sanchez much earlier (which at the very least establishes him as a suspect for the unknown gunman). Find the dismantled pad of the thing Freeman was working on with MacDonald?

And should I expand Freeman's small but nice house in Alamogordo to a small but nice spread north of White Sands, close to the road to Stallion Gate (or at least, within a long hike of the Trinity Site?) And maybe MacDonald continued to work for him as a ranch hand? I may have to give up putting him on a horse...that was only a fun thing and I can make the emotional point if he's riding a vintage Indian into the desert -- just as long as Penny can be stupid enough to think she can follow him on foot.

(Come to think, there were a couple of lovely Packards at the nuke museum. Built like tanks, those things were.)

And if I'm moving around geography, what about using the actual Owl Bar and Cafe (which is in San Antonio?) Yes, I absolutely saw the thing as I was driving through. Wish I'd stopped but at the time I didn't realize it was the original.

Oh, yeah. And that stuff about not having a B plot? I make it a point not to be trapped by the "Next Time..." things I write in the back of the previous book, but I did promise "Angry activists." I really do want to send Penny in the direction of the WIP, and get her suspicious of some company that's somewhat smaller than Sandia -- small enough she can have a confrontation with an evasive suit-and-tie sort.

And I just realized this might be coming out of remnants left by my current archive-binge at Mythcreants. The Phillip Marlowe archetype, disdainful of authority and far too inclined to talk back. Not really Penny's thing (she's sort of naturally polite, or at least kind) but I could see her going there.

And that all means I've got more work to do to pull this plot together. The important parts, that is. The emotional through-line, the themes, the way each clue is clearly delivered and changes the big picture in interesting ways. The other stuff -- I can always come up with an excuse to have a guy come through the door with a gun.

Geography

I was going to sit down and study the maps. I was sort of hoping to find a couple of good maps that laid out all the data in one place. Well, I seem to have picked up enough of the geology, geography, history and social geography to at least nail down the basics so I can work on my plot.

Having the ground truth helps so much. I've seen the playa and the transition zones into the dune field and I've driven the distances between Alamogordo and Albuquerque.

The geology works. Basically, the playa is another face of the same chemistry that created the dunes. Well, that keeps creating them, as they are an ongoing and evolving feature. Water leaches gypsum from the surrounding mountains, which forms briny lakes. Those evaporate forming selenite crystals, which are broken up by weathering until they are fine enough to be carried by the wind, forming the dunes.

That same fine gypsum sand reforms a crust when wetted and allowed to dry again. That's why trails through the local hills look like the Park Service was out there pouring concrete to stabilize them. It does the same thing in the playa, which change humidity seasonally (catching rains, then drying -- there's no outlet -- through the warmer months). Meaning there's churn, but whatever is brought closer to the surface is at least temporarily protected with a natural plaster jacket.

All of this White Sands geology (there's a lot more of it than gypsum sands!) is roughly contiguous with the ancient Lake Otero. There was a lush grasslands setting there around the Paleolithic. Mammoths and giant sloths and humans were living hunting et al along the lake edge and left tracks in the mud that, when conditions were right, were preserved.

So this is the right landscape. Outside the dunes but still within where the fine gypsum sand blows, where it is arid and alkali cool desert (elevation too; 1,000 feet or more). The water table is very close to the surface, as it happens (the sands proper go very deep; thirty feet at least).

Geographically it works for me. The playa are very close to the national monument but rather than the archeologists going down Dune Drive every morning, it makes more sense for them to get an escort from and through Holloman AFB. And it makes sense to have them at Alamogordo (Las Cruces would also be convenient, but while this is conveniently big city and a university town besides -- second largest town in New Mexico -- I like the vibe of Penny trying to deal with the small-town feel of Alamogordo.)

But in New Mexico space, Albuquerque or Roswell really aren't that far away. Psychically, the nuclear community has always transcended strictly physical mapping and the right people at Alamogordo can still feel like they are part and parcel with Los Alamos.

For ethno-history... I can make it work. It might even work better. There's the old pots-not-people problem but there's enough genetic data -- and the archaeological cultures are different enough -- that it does seem very likely that the pre-Clovis "Footprints" culture, the Archaic and paleoindian cultures like the Jornada Mogollon, and late-comers like the Apache, are really movements of people.

Put aside any thoughts of the "mysterious lost Anasazi," though. There's more than one reason why the modern name is "Ancestral Pueblo." Of course "Pueblo" is as much a blanket term as, say, Iroquois. Only in this case the facile name given by early Spanish explorers reveals something deep about the cultures of the Southwest. The same maize cultivation and arid landscape, the same adobe construction, and it is not entirely surprising similar rituals appear. And useful technologies spread. And the pueblo cultures are exogamous as well as traders in materials and ideas.

So while it matters that there are multiple language groups, and tribal distinctions within those language groups, it is also not incorrect to include Tewa Pueblo, Ancestral Pueblo, Hopi, and Dineh within some "pueblo" super-group. And, yes, some do claim continuity with the 1,500 - 1,000 BCE Jornada Mogollon (itself a super-culture designation).

Okay. Archaeological culture? A collection of distinctive artifacts frequently found in proximity and bounded by time and space. Pots not people. It just means that there's enough of this style of pottery and these particular ways of laying out a pit dwelling that can be identified as "kinda mostly like this through this stretch of territory over this period of time." It doesn't mean (though far too many take it to imply) that this is a "race" or some other distinctive identity cultural political and genetic.

And it works for me if "MacDonald" comes from family that lost their ranch when The Hill (Los Alamos) was eminent-domained out from under them, but came over the decades of living (and nuclear testing) in the White Sands area to identify strongly enough with that land he formed his own bonds with it. And if in his mind he associates his Tewa Pueblo with the Archaic cultures of the Southwest, or his own family with the Luchero family (yes, the source of the name Lake Luchero) who also lost their land to the government in 1940, that's his business.

And once again, it becomes Penny's business to fathom MacDonald's internal geography and find her way to the secret he was buried with.

Itinerary

Flew into Albuquerque, stayed two nights in a motel along Central (old route 66) and took the free ART bus everywhere.

Ate at Weck's (a chain diner), a small neighborhood breakfast place, lunch at the Pueblo Kitchen adjoining the IPCC.  Lots of green chilis. Museum of Nuclear Science (so many bombs...and multiple aircraft and missiles and one sail parked outside). Took a quick stroll through Old Town and the Plaza on the way to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

Rented a car the last morning and drove to the Tijeras Pueblo Archaeological Site, then on to Roswell. UFO Museum, and lunch at the flying-saucer McDonald's. Continued to Alamogordo.

Two nights at a B&B in Alamogordo. White Sands national park with two educational trails and a long hike. Ate at a burger joint near the go-kart track and that was enough for one day. Next day visited the National Space Museum then headed to the Three Rivers Petroglyph site and did the walk there. Took one last detour up to Stallion Gate over the three-hour drive back to the car rental. Got into Albuquerque Sun Port almost an hour ahead of drop-dead and was at the gate in plenty of time. Then had a delayed flight in Phoenix and ended up well past midnight anyhow.

The Time of Sands

I did my trip. A lot of moving parts, but almost all of it worked. The places where it slipped were mostly with the airlines, who have learned it isn't profitable to keep a proper fleet running so are constantly having to delay and reschedule flights -- and acting surprised at the results. And several of the museums had closed the exhibits I was interested in, without bothering to tell anyone they'd done so (in defense of the one that had a Goddard exhibit, they got flooded out and lost more than that).

Some of the things I wanted to find turned out to be not really there to find. Like a live music scene in Alamogordo. A strange town, that. I'm not sure one could get a grasp of it without living there for a while.

But I got so far down through my stretch goals I got on the plane with only regrets that I hadn't been able to find a New Mexican coffee anywhere (it's apparently made with chocolate and red chili.) I couldn't do the Trinity site, but I drove into the reservation all the way down to Stallion Gate before turning around. Hit three archaeological sites and a Pueblo cultural center, three museums, and took the risk of the surprisingly challenging (black diamond trail markers were a big hint) Alkali Flats hike through the gypsum dunes.

But Alamogordo? Look, I sort of pulled it out of a hat. I hadn't done nearly enough work on the geology and prehistory to place my fictional dig site, and I was guessing this was the best town both for my archaeologists to be staying at, and for story purposes. Turns out the former is basically plausible. The latter is...unsure. The people and situations I had in my head may not fit the town I saw. Hard to tell. It is a hard town to get a grip on.

I passed through other alternatives. There are a number of almost-not-there towns spread around the area, ones too tiny to even have a gas station. And from here, with a map and some basic reading, I could see Albuquerque or Truth or Consequences but I had no grasp of New Mexico space. People drive there. A lot. Distances are compressed when there is straight roads with little to stop for and posted speed limits of up to 75. I personally was hitting 85 for stretches so long I learned how to use cruise control. The kind of stretch of highway where Siri says, "Turn left, then continue straight for the next 186 miles."

So Tularosa is on -- more of a melting-pot feel than Alamogordo, with an "old town" to rival Albuquerque, more hispanic/nuevomexicano presence, really more of a Taos flavor. Or Cloudcroft, which is ski lodge meets western revival town with more than a bit of that Boulder vibe. Or even Albuquerque, the closest thing to big city New Mexico has, for all that it is far short of proper skyscrapers.

Still, Alamogordo will probably work. With some adjustment on my part.

I also really need to hit the geology, and the history of human presence from the footprints to Jornada Morgellon to Apache. (Pueblo peoples -- Dineh included -- are basically more north. Oops.) Because in this book, the plot totally hinges around the dig, what is there and why it is there.

Right now that feels like a lot of work, and not really that exciting. I'm happy to have the endurance back to be able to handle seven-plus miles of hiking on challenging trails plus driving all day (at fairly scary speeds -- but I only slid once.) The series is never going to take off even if I did pick up two sales by putting the last book up for free for a couple of days as a promotion.

Replacing Physics with Geometry: Subnautica Below Zero

Coming back to the Subnautica series after playing a variety of other games -- particularly Satisfactory, but there are some common elements of the gameplay loops in Horizon Zero Dawn as well -- I have a different understanding of why the second game got a poor reception.

It really is a different game. There are several things that change it from a long and largely free-form experience into one that is more scripted, with clearer goals and more pressure. There are other decisions that take away from the existential loneliness that characterized the previous game. Largely, this is the current AAA growth path, where games are being shaped to deliver an easier game that can be finished more quickly.

And then pad out the run time with collectibles. But that's another discussion.

For Below Zero, the changes do not begin with the map, but that map is a good route to understanding the huge changes in philosophy.

 Above is the Subnautica map. Below is, well, Below Zero. But this comparison is misleading in two ways; first, only the blue areas are actually ocean. The brown land areas are significantly path-biased, to where it is more like travelling down a corridor from one small point of interest to another.

Second, the Subnautica map is underlaid by two other areas that are both larger than the ocean areas of the Below Zero map; the Brine River, and the even deeper Lava. The Below Zero map condenses its deeper levels into largely isolated pockets; post holes instead of trenches.

Lots of people have complained in reviews about the Sea Truck, how slow it moves, how nimble it isn't. But that's just a symptom. In Subnautica, the vast size of the map meant that keeping track of where you were, and traveling to where you wanted to go, was epic. That was what gave the game challenge. Getting about, moving materials about, trying to keep track of where useful resources (or even your own bases!) were.

And this was also sparse, open, with the dangerous depths being particularly huge and dark. This was a lonely world, where the forlorn bits of broken escape pods were tiny and lost. Out of sight, also, was the threat of larger creatures. Only when exploring inside a wreck did the game become claustrophobic. Instead it offered thalassophobia.

Below Zero gives most of the game that claustrophobia. They don't have a faster submarine not because the map is too small, but because that's not how they are using the map. Instead of having a wide-open unmapped space, you have tiny confusing twisting warrens.

You can't see where you are going, the sea truck barely fits at all (and is constantly breaking down from being pounded against kelp and coral), and big parts of the game involve turning tight circles in a space only a hundred meters across trying to find the one spot where you can wriggle behind a frond and find the next part of the passage.

And if you do it without the sub or prawn suit, your oxygen meter is ticking down all the time.

Even on land, hypothermia is coming on you as fast as oxygen depletes underwater. No lonely contemplation of the vastness of the sea and your own insignificance; this has become a twitch game where more often than not you are desperately trying to figure out a twisty path before you die.

Oh, yeah. And lonely? Between Al-lan (the alien in your head) and the voiced protagonist, this is no longer lonely. And there's a plot, and a distinct goal, and everything but waypoints. So instead of being alone to figure out the meaning of your new life under the sea, you are up against the clock with a job to do.

Even depth is downplayed. In Subnautica, depth is a challenge and a constant threat. You are always pressing the limits of your various submarines, listening to that hull creak and knowing you are down too deep to safely swim back to the surface if it fails. And you have to push these depths in order to find the rare materials that allow you to go one step deeper. Again, it is physics that is the challenge.

In Below Zero it is about threading narrow confusing passages and the sense of depth is barely there at all. If you can figure out the navigation, you can in fact swim to most of the locations, even down in the deepest part of the Red Crystal cave (well...it helps to build a couple of bases along the way!)

The Reapers, also, were distant roars echoing through the vast darkness. Out there somewhere. In the confined spaces of Below Zero there is no mystery. The damned thing is right there in your face. You aren't blind, wondering what is out there (the thalassophobia again). You are hiding under a bit of rock with the damned thing overhead. And that actually makes them less scary.

Another limiting factor many games reach for is inventory. One is always confronted with needs that are greater than the space. In Satisfactory many of the tech advances increase your inventory (until Satisfactory 1.0, which by inventing quantum storage removes the question entirely). In Horizon Zero Dawn you increase the size of your bags through crafting -- making for various lengthy hunts after rare bits of fur and string.

Below Zero leaves the sweet spot far behind as it places riches beyond measure in places that are hard to get to. And not just requiring a long trip to shuttle back and forth; in a warren that you will get inevitably lost in, and possibly die from lack of oxygen or food or water. In the former case, you can still ferry materials if you are willing to put up with a little boredom. Put the sub in gear and go listen to the radio or drink coffee or something. In the later, you face so much frustration you decide you'd rather do without.

At least this issue can be solved. I finally modded my copy of the game for double to triple the size of all containers (yes, you get more inventory with the various vehicles...which are even smaller boxes than your personal inventory!)

***

So what could be done with the game? Really, nothing much. They had a better story which for whatever reason they decided against. This makes the two plots disconnected; you can actually finish the game while completely ignoring the original storyline. 

The pressure of having a clear goal also creates a disconnect with the exploration and crafting. The original Subnautica fell perhaps a little too much on the other side of this; the story was so unimportant to you that, really, you stumbled into bits of it while exploring to find ways to improve your increasingly elaborate base.

Below Zero misses this balance. I literally was just trying to find materials for my prawn suit when I accidentally stumbled on the last of Al-An's blueprints and was offered the final segment of the game to play.

Below Zero can still be played off the clock, not paying attention to the story and just hanging out in the water doing a bit of light crafting. But, you know? The cramped confines of that tiny map (and the increased density of predators) means there's fewer great spaces to build a sprawling base in. And gathering the resources is more of a challenge and a frustration.

Perhaps the third game will regain its proper fluid balance.

Not Actually Archaeology

The BBC had a short-lived show called Bonekickers. It also hosts a long collection of comments/reviews by BBC subscribers. Most of them were not happy.

I have come to realize that all these shows and franchises; Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, Relic Hunter, The Librarian and The Librarians, National History -- and a whole lot of book series as well -- are really offering history. Calling their heroes archaeologists, historians, iconologist/symbologists or even librarians is misleading because these stories are in no way about these academic disciplines.

These characters are instead guides, viewpoints, story tools; doorways to enter a plot that engages with history (and, more often than not, its artifacts).

So I'm with those BBC reviewers who commented they didn't expect to see good field practice going on. They had come for the fun of exploring history. The trowel is just a slightly more real-world version of a TARDIS. Just as whatever wacky interpretations Dan Brown's characters want to make about Renaissance art are merely an excuse to delve into that history.

There is reason why any show with a budget will dramatize a few minutes in that past time. In books of a certain kind, this is the "Diego Velasquez the Reluctant Conquistador" prologue, where we are briefly on the Yucatan Peninsula in 1525 before our POV character dies in the jungle, leaving only some tantalizing clue for our modern-day cast.

The thing of it is...

H.G. Wells has a quote about getting the audience to accept one impossible thing then getting on with the story. The readers and watchers are willing to accept our unlikely heroes and their terrible working methods as the premise that makes the story possible.

But what I seem to be finding more and more is people, who go on to dislike whatever franchise it is, for making such a muck of the history they promised. That's the follow-up, that's the part where Wells said you need to play fair.

And to be fair, much of this churn may be because the interwebs are crawling with amateur historians and amateur historians (especially military historians) rate high on the crank-o-meter.

History, though. Real history is messy. I understand the urge towards simplifying, cleaning up. I am willing to argue that most academic presentations of history are forced to simplify, clean up, and make unsupported leaps in order to make the material more comprehensible. Every historian has their own lens, their own spin (which is why the good ones are using so many citations; that way, you can at least check to see if what they have decided to tell you about a certain source is what you, personally, think of that source when you read it.)

It gets worse when you are trying to dramatize. I'm trying to write as true to the real world as I can, myself, but I am selecting, curating, committing huge sins of omission, and sometimes outright changing something to make for a better story. I scaled up Notre Dame de Paris by about 25% -- unless you want to assume my protagonist stands five-foot-two with boots on, some of her climbing stunts just don't work on the real building.

For most writers, visual media or no, the real world isn't as spectacular or as convenient as they'd like. That lovely castle ruin in Germany is at least decently big, but it is dressed in wire fencing, fronted by ticket booth and snack stands, and crawling with tourists. Any convenient secret passage will have been discovered long ago by the cleaning crew (if not the restorers!) and any lovely gold crown you find down there is going to interest Customs and a whole batch of other people very much.

Besides, of course, not glowing. Hell, if you find an ancient sword, you are lucky if you can even recognize it was a sword. You aren't going to be swinging it over your head any time soon. Not unless you like rust in your hair.

So does it help that the professional practices of our heroes might get a free pass? I mean, even without having them being under the pressure of a zombie apocalypse? Or without there being actual, you know, world destroying magic buried under that step pyramid in the Yucatan.

Yeah, I think we can all accept that our heroes might not have time for the camel-hair brushes, just like the heroes of another franchise can't always make time to rouse a judge and get a warrant signed.

But the thing of it is...I don't think the free pass lasts for garbage history. Even secret world, conspiracy, alternate history has to play by the rules. Wells' dictum is still there. The presence and nature of zombies is free, and Cleopatra XVIII Philpator's real reason to ally with Marc Anthony (to fight off the zombies, of course!) can be whatever the writer needs and the reader is fine with that.

But Alexandria had better be correct (and the Romans had better be wearing the correct armor!)