What is a living creature? It responds to things, and it multiplies. From the perspective of computing, it’s an entity that is capable of input and output, with a manner of self-propagation.
Ah, propagation… Therein lies the interesting element–the growth of a population. Consider a hypothetical case, where you start out on a desert island with a pair of male and female creatures; each female produces just one female offspring per generation, and stops reproducing after two generation. Assume the male is immortal, and massive incest occurs to create all subsequent generations, all females. The heritage diagram of sorts would look something like this:
Or, referencing the same diagram, but slightly more organized, and not-too-snobby-against-the-color-blind (thanks to @WildstarB):
To make it more interesting, Fibonacci, from back in the day, thought of the same problem. Apparently, bunnies were the most nearly-instantly promiscuous creatures back then, so his gedanken involved bunnies, and he devised the eponymous Fibonacci Sequence using the generation scheme described above (though, he didn’t use an immortal male, but rather, the assumption that each female produces a male and female pair per generation, with guaranteed brother-sister incest).
This is just an interesting thought experiment of an extremely basic model for describing population growth that, other than using bunnies as our key sex players, has absolutely nothing related to the virtual bunnies to be discussed in the rest of this article.
The point is that living creatures, in addition to responding to stimuli, have internal mechanisms of sorts that enable its reproduction. At least, that’s the perspective of a living creature that we have from observing its behavior from our limited microcosm. Microcosm? Habitat?
We’re actually right on topic, heading onto the most basic features of creating a virtual critter with AI-esque–certainly necessary for the creation of the virtual bunnies that piqued up your interest.
II. The Pseudo-Physics of Our Subset of the Virtual Microcosm
In “RL”, when you drop a ball, it falls, and when it hits a flat surface, it stops falling (though it might bounce or roll or crack or explode, or do a number of things in reaction to this action of collision). In “SL” or any virtual reality, when you drop a ball, it might not do any of those things, or it might do all of those things, depending on what you program the “physics” of your virtual microcosm to be. The essential affect is the reaction to an action–what happens when the collision (or, in general, the interaction among separate entities) occurs. In a virtual reality, this reaction is defined by a pseudo-physics that governs what happens when this interaction occurs.
When you’re working with phantom objects on SL, or regular objects that are not explicitly physical, you can’t rely on the built-in physics system, and thus you must design your own–from the perspective of parsimonious code being the most efficient (read: best), this is basically a “good-enough” physics system that will emulate just the wanted or needed reaction.
If you’re trying to program virtual critters (VC) or moving objects that are phantom, you’d need to worry about what happens visually when they collide. They ought to be “smart enough” to bounce away, or try avoiding merging into each other. A simple solution would be to have a llSensorRepeat() detect and react to objects that enter a certain small “bounding sphere,” whenever the virtual critter (VC) is moving. Upon entering the radius of this bounding sphere, the original VC will try “hopping” a random-small-distance away from the impending VC. Similarly, since the impending VC has the same bounding sphere “pseudo-physics”, it will try doing the same thing. Both VC’s will continue hopping randomly away until their “bounding spheres” do not intersect. This is the HB Bunny 1.x solution to avoiding the classic “merging phenomenon” demonstrated in the beta.
Characteristic behavior is really an orchestra of interaction, a sequence of action-reaction occurrences–a sunflower blooming towards the sunlight, a mouse attracted to cheese. But yet, when you look in nature, on the subject of group animal movement, you wonder what keeps them together in the way they move. For example, migrating birds often fly in a V-shaped “formation”. Obviously, the solidness of their physical bodies keeps their bodies from merging, unlike the phantom VC’s described earlier, but how do they know to fly in this V-shape, and why do they do this? While science has speculated on several reasons why, deferring to economy of such motion, how they do it requires both wirings in the bird brain that respond to such a situation, as well as features in reality that allow this. When cast in such an abstractified perspective, it becomes clear that what’s happening is that there is simply a different, but “equivalent” mechanism at work to keep things in formation–in reality, and in its emulation, virtual reality.
A series of such mechanisms might be considered to be governing characteristics of a paradigm. In the case of the phantom VC’s, their movement might be set such that they will move only when they detect a mat, and such that they will stay level only to the mat. Because the VC will detect the mat, it is almost like a magnet, or from a more macroscopic perspective, the mat is like a flat earth — although, contrary to what the Flat Earth Society believes, the mat doesn’t accelerate(!), and yet things simply stick to it.
A pseudo-physics that deals with only the known elements in a microcosm works because the VC only has to react to certain things, rather than to all elements in the physics of its containing world; moreover, having the VC respond only to such known elements in a microcosm is more resource efficient. Using this idea, in a pseudo-physics named “FIZ”, the HB Bunny implementation of my VC design averages to only 0.1 ms at peak, which is a fraction of what most AO’s take. The HB Bunny will “hop” away when they hit each other, or small objects named HB Rock. They detect only objects known to them, such as HB Food (which they eat), HB Toy (which keeps them happy), and HB Mat (which, they stick to). Moreover, in SL, when one uses VC’s whose prims are sculpted prims, it is actually necessary to use an alternative physics system, as sculpted prim bounding-boxes are not always as expected and precise as those of regular-prim VC’s. The phenomenon that may bring wonder is that with such simple behavior constraints, a VC that appears “alive”. And, with further internal constraints that will change their behavior, such as growth functions and mating functions, VC’s appear “living”–more on that in a later section, though!
The idea of having a creature react only to things that are immediately relevant to it, or that it is capable of detecting, is actually a common phenomenon in nature, RL. Humans and other animals live in the real physical world, but are capable of perceiving only a limited subset of reality. For example, we humble humans are not capable of seeing UV or infrared light, though other animals can; we are consciously susceptible only to a limited subset of the electromagnetic spectrum, though our bodies may react incrementally to gamma-ray bombardment, for example, its effects are 99.9% too small for any macroscopically-observable difference to occur. Many examples also exist on the size spectrum; we can’t see things that are too small (a virus, for example), or too big (the universe! - we live in it, but we can’t detect its entirety). But yet, we function in our own paradigm, and equivalently, so do these VC’s.
III. The Protocols of Life… Er… aLife!
Artificial life or, to coin a term, “aLife” might be considered a fine-tuned simplified set of protocols that emulate life, with complexity depending on the realism of the particular aLife entity. There are three general categories of aLife protocols–external interaction, internal determination, and non-interactive autonomous behavior. I will briefly discuss elements of each category for VC’s, particularly in relation to their implementation in HB Bunny.
External interactions occur when either collision occurs, or when an interaction is proximate, within detection vicinity.
Collisions occur with either the environment or its objects. In a pseudo-physics as described above, i.e., a physics that deals with only a limited microcosm, collisions that generate recognizable reactions would occur only with known objects, such as objects named a particular name, or flagged otherwise for detection. In the HB Mat example above, the HB Bunny’s environment is simply its mat, and this is its entire world, on which it can move. (However, if the mat is moved slowly, the HB Bunny will be able to go beyond its old bounding box environment, to “move with the world;” but, it is really the world that moves the VC…)
Some examples of possible proximity behavior phenomena are sickness (too many VC’s nearby), friendly interaction (gathering to sleep at night), or mating (for sexual creatures, at least two’s required). For HB Bunny, sickness occurs when the VC detects more than 6 scripted objects named HB Bunny nearby; sickness is manifest as an incremental counter, from 1 to 100 units, which can be decremented when the VC is hungry, and eats twice as much to decrement both hunger and sickness. HB Bunny will first find each other, in friendly “compassionate” behavior, and gather close-ly at night time to sleep, before deactivating all detection until daytime. Mating is possible when a HB Bunny is more than 14 days old, and is fully-grown and considered an “adult bunny”; presence of an eligible non-pregnant mate of the opposite gender is required.
Mating is perhaps one of the most important components, when you’re creating aLife for the purposes of viral breeding. And, since we’re 21st-century non-gender-discriminating folks, a significant mating system for VC’s must account for the case of gayness or genetically-disposed celibacy (with respect to impregnating). From the perspective of statistics, gayness might be considered a non-systematic deviation from the mean. Thus, consider a system where gender is assigned on birth of a VC as a global variable, and where this global variable might–in an extremely rare case–be reset. Assign the null value of gender to default to female VC, and the non-null value to be the male VC; when reset, or when communication error occurs (which has a higher chance on noisy-platforms such as LSL/SL), gender becomes “miscarried,” and you wind up with an effectively gay VC (i.e., outwardsly-male, inwardsly-female).
But, in general, the proposed VC mating system does contain the regular features of mating, such as VC-preferred-selectivism in mate selection, as well as birthing processes. This is best summarized in the diagram here (please click to see the larger version):
Mating selection occurs on closest-match of a random number generated by the female and male bunny; call this the mating random number (”MRN”). To add “personality-in-female-choice,” in the HB project, I chose to have the male bunny generate his MRN at birth. A female bunny generates her MRN each time she goes into heat. The male is the one who chooses which female number is closest to his, and thus will favor a certain female if she generates the right MRN each time they meet while she is not pregnant (they’re bunnies, and not monoagamous).
To conserve resources, heat only occurs when there are eligible opposite-gender adult bunnies nearby. For HB Bunny, mating only occurs when bunnies are near non-pregnant entities of the opposite sex, and if bunny characteristic conditions fit (bunny has to be both happy and energetic enough).
Internal Determination is necessary to show changes in a VC’s characteristics (such as its core stats - happiness, energy, hunger, sickness, etc.) and changes in states. A VC contains a –literally — biological clock that governs its self-behaviors, such as growth and perkiness. A VC has three general states: awake/living, dead, and sleeping (semi-conscious). In the case of HB Bunny, when it is sleeping (and has found the other bunnies, if any), the entire script “goes to sleep”, suspending detection of other objects, effectively giving the simulator hosting the VC, some time to cool off. When the VC is living, it goes through its full range of behaviors. When the VC is dead, it simply ceases to exist in the virtual reality, other than as data stored in a database somewhere.
Non-Interactive Involuntary-Autonomous Behavior is generally an aesthetic feature of VC’s, as they do not have any “internal organs,” other than scripts. HB Bunny VC’s blink and twitch, and sometimes, they “bristle” on SL texture change lag.
IV. Concluding Remarks - Some Thoughts on Copy Protection and “Playing God”
The rage about SL virtual animals is likely due to the spirit of creation, albeit in a VC-promiscuous way, but then again, it’s also due to the value that they (and their offspring) develop, in part due to their rarity. Copy-protection is essential to the survival of a VC line whose lifespan depends on costly server-resources to run, which is, paradoxically, funded through steady sales of VC’s. But, next-generation propagation is also important, so I will discuss the general idea behind the propagation of turtles and Sion chickens (call this the “traditional method”), as well as alternatives.
The “traditional method” for a VC to give “birth” to offsprings essentially has the female VC rez an egg, and then have her drop a VC in the egg. The mother has a copy of this offspring VC in her inventory; her offspring in the egg, does not (but will, once they are born, as the egg script, will, in turn, give a copy of the VC to the newborn - though, for HB, this happens only for the female newborns).
The “Infinitely Viral Urn” is the most basic implementation, with delayed inventory-drop check, of a script-based object self-reproduction. You only need to get a single urn, touch it, and it will give you another urn, that will, in turn, be able to “give birth” to yet another urn, and so on. What’s interesting to note is that if you attempt a “Cesarian,” by just taking the baby urn from the mother urn’s inventory without having it being “born” through a regular touch-rez, the baby urn will poof in a quick burst of stillborn particles. This is basic copy protection, where rezzing of a scripted object is only permitted by the script.
On SL, though, the problem of no-copy becomes complicated with a faulty permission system. The “traditional method” for copy-protection is also what’s done for the classic SL-AI-esque VC’s, the turtles and chickens. When a VC is transferred, it must be taken to inventory or sold in-place; using the SL feature of take-copy will disrupt normal script-flow and disable the VC. When taken to inventory, the traditional method requires that the VC be boxed. While the VC may be a +copy/+xfer object, the box itself is always no-copy. One the VC is boxed, it’s the box that is the inworld indicator of the uniqueness of the original VC. To prevent both the old owner and new owner from having the same copy of the VC, the box applies its no-copy permission to its inventory VC. When the VC is unboxed, what occurs is that a completely new VC is rezzed, but the data that defines the characteristics of the old VC is transferred, to give the appearance of the old VC’s continual existence, even though it technically ceased to exist the moment it was boxed.
Incidentally, a seamless updater works just like unboxing a VC, except the new updated VC is rezzed in the position of the old VC; it’s the same idea of “injecting” data from the old VC into the new, to make it appear a continuous incarnation of the original. Like boxing, the original was destroyed upon updating.
An alternative way to facilitating copy-protection would be to use a technique I’ve dubbed “pregnancy fortified food“. This would allow the best of protection in that all VC’s would have the SL no-copy permission, because the new VC is actually the no-copy inventory in the food bowl. (Kind of brings a whole new perspective to “eating something to get pregnant!”)
In conclusion, I can’t help but recount the times when I felt like some deity when planning the general VC diagrams, and in implementing the HB Bunny, and in fact, it was more hubris than anything else that prompted me to take this project. I was even high enough to address myself as “Bunny Goddess”, at one point.
In beta phases, we tested the HB Bunnies on shortened lifespans, roughly 1 beta day = 10 regular days. (This meant the bunnies became adult and mating-age in about 1.5 days.) So, anyway, the fact that 1) these bunnies will automatically sleep at sunset, 2) have predetermined “promised lifetime of 356 days (barring starvation or sicknes)”, and 3) essentially have their body mechanisms limited by AI, and more, does not make me like the Goa’uld experimenting on the Argosians. (If you read this entry before hulu takes it off, the entire Stargate episode where that happened is embedded below.)
Written by ina on Thursday, 24 of December , 2009 at 12:18 pm
I haven’t been posting because, other than a few absent-minded releases and such, I have not had much time to spend on SL, and thus haven’t really done “much on SL these days” (of course, knowing me, my “much” is rather relative to my voracious appetite for more [read: insatiable ego]). Anyhow, I have been spending around 95% of my time in RL, which means dealing with plentiful politics in academia, and in trying to obtain RL funding for my virtual artistic endeavors. Both endeavors have proven to be complete wastes of both time and creativity, especially the latter. The epitome of bad PR aside, it doesn’t help that there are times when it seems that Linden Lab is imploding on itself.
This means we have basically less than 2 months left to try to raise funding for the SL Shakespeare sims. Last year, the SOS Campaign took us over a year to raise the funds whose original deadline had been 3 months. The good part is that we have some leftover after paying tier last round (as shown in SLSC Transparency); this is due to LindeX fluctuations and people donating directly (such as Wunderlichs), but we still have the better part of the ~L$700k needed for tier for 3 island sims, paid 6 months in advance. The bad part is that I simply don’t have the time or energy (what’s the point!) to run another SOS Campaign. And thanks to my merchant reputation being selectively sabotaged by Linden Lab, nor do I have the $L to secretly “pitch in” the missing and needed chunk of $L (like I have done each time in past SLSC fundraisers), without breaking my Fundamental Principle. Anyway, I want to be able to use my free time on SL to create shows, such as the stalled but long-awaited SL Shakespeare Company’s Twelfth Night, Act 2! And, for the few of you who have actually seen SLSC main canon shows, you understand that we simply cannot do these shows without a four sim infrastructure! What to do, what to do…
Onto happier news… stuff that don’t relate to the maladies of a starving artist trying to paint in a borked virtual world…
About two weeks ago, I chanced upon meeting Hunny Larimore. Before I knew it, I started writing the code that would become the backbone of the HB Bunny SL “AI” application. I was a total SL AI animals virgin, and it wasn’t until just a few days ago that I finally looked at other SL AI animals; as a result, I not only started coding from scratch, but also designing from scratch, thinking up my own ways of how to make certain processes work. More on my findings and musings about life, the universe, and everything per this project in the next post
Written by ina on Sunday, 24 of May , 2009 at 1:08 am Tags: naivety, transparency
I’ve just created a really super-open Transparency subsite for SL Shakespeare Company public funds. Here is perhaps the core of my naivety: as explained on the site, all funds raised go towards paying tier to Linden Lab — and there is a significant debt just in that arena, not even getting towards actual non-venue production costs–basically, people who do the most work don’t get paid at all in funds, and end up putting in both time and money themselves, so it’s just for artistic license. It’s truly art for art, the cause qua cause, which, imhno, is the way an ideal nonprofit should be run.
This is the policy that I’ve always worked with since I first entered SL. Back then, I was much more naive about money, believing in donated land and ideal collaborations. When owners of donated land became destructive, I realized that such a model doesn’t work. That was why I ended up purchasing four islands on SL for my artistic endeavors. As you might have noticed with my less-and-less frequent endeavors on SL, that idealism doesn’t work in RL. When I started, I had a significant personal fund saved up to do something like this, but that’s been pretty much depleted. It seems the largest source of disputes centered on my creativity–few people could believe that I worked without pay in my long-term maniac-loads of time put in to create on SL. That might also stem from envy, to an extent–whether of people who would wish for such a chance, or for inferiority-superiority reasons. But, for what it’s worth, I am making public the meager funds we’ve raised and explaining their usage in SLSC Transparency.
Written by ina on Monday, 11 of May , 2009 at 7:18 pm
Last month, I spent a couple of hours applying to TEDGlobal. Admittedly, the biggest reason I did that was because it’s held in Oxford, and me being in my Shakespeare phase… the UK is the one place in the world I’d want to un-hermit myself to go to. I also convinced myself that it’d be a worthwhile experience to attend, if only to meet people who can help sponsor my projects — sadly, the prospect of art for art sans funds just doesn’t work out, especially when (though you thrive at it!) you end up having to do everything yourself. Then again, considering that my formal education is nothing in what I’m perusing independently now (virtual worlds, Shakespeare and virtual theatre, historical reconstructions, medieval studies), maybe I might find some sort of epiphany there that might guide me on a different path…
I create more than I talk. Most of the time I don’t have the time to update my blog; I am so immersed in actually doing things instead of reflecting on them.
Projects mean more to me than anything else in the world; I exist to create and do.
I am a true polymath, adept in many things across the spectrum, and not limited to just math/science or arts for example, but in both that and more.
Reasons why TED shouldn’t choose me:
I might not be sane. My mental processes are abnormal; normal people don’t have their speech functions disabled in order to maximize creativity. My visual IQ typically far overshadows my auditory IQ.
I’m quite evidently a hermit; I was even candid enough to mention in my application that I find myself antisocial. There’s too much uncertainty in my nature.
The cynical mentality behind the (Shakespearean) Authorship Question - People might not believe me. Most people don’t sacrifice their lives to do everything well.
And, though I made it to as far as receiving a phone interview from Logan (TED Program Coordinator), today at brunch, the verdict came out the negative with a rejection letter! I believe the phone call revealed my insanity. So, we know now that TED polymaths are the sane types…
I used to use modo and zbrush to create sculpties (sculpted prims) for Second Life. Yesterday, I stumbled on Blender and spent a huge part of the day throwing things on various objects in draping experiments (it’s kind of mesmerizing in a similar fashion to action painting). It generally takes me a few days to get used to a new 3d modeling program, but I found myself getting into Blender in just a few hours, and even had time to record a tutorial on draping cloth in Blender that first day. Now, more and more, I think Blender is AWESOME for making sculpted prims because:
You can reorient the bounding box of the sculpty simply by re-setting the Axes (Press F9, Center New).
Realtime-esque Cloth-draping, and select whichever frame of the simulation you want to use, then 1-click export using the (also) open-source Blender sculpty conversion scripts by Domino! (See the 5-minute tutorial here.)
Blender’s OOP-ness makes it easy to automagically turn things into other things (literally!), as well as to rewire things from a “holistic Matrix-sort of backend view”, and its non-linear layers make it fun to have a variety of sculpts (especially simulation-based cloth-sculpts) in the same file, without the scene getting grotesquely messy. It’s also an interesting way to get organized.
Using a lattice modifier to sculpt is awesome!
Blender is not only free, but also open source!
If you’ve got that crazy idea weighing you down, you can go right into it and mod it from code!
Also, I’m of the belief that traditional modes of software licenses will soon become extinct… While it used to be that o/s software often died out after their lead gets corp-cannibalized, it seems the exact opposite nowadays. Migrating to open source now is, interestingly, an investment for the future — both in funds saved and time saved.
[ The Mistress of the Art of Death series recounts the adventures in medieval England of Adelia Vesuvia Rachel Aguilar, a rare woman trained as a medical doctor in the famous schools of Salerno. Under the summons of King Henry II, in Book I, Adelia arrives in England to solve a mystery concerning the murders of many children. Though disgusted by him at first, she meets and falls in love with Sir Rowley Picot, but chooses to undergo an unofficial relationship with him in order to maintain her independence. In Book II (The Serpent’s Tale), the King’s favorite concubine Rosamund is found dead, and Adelia is summoned to solve the mystery. Adelia has settled into a home in the fens with Glytha—and Rowley’s child, whom she is determined to raise without him. (After Adelia had spurned married life with him, Rowley had taken the King’s offer to become Bishop Rowley.) Book III in this historical fiction saga (with its own quirky dose of forensics) puts Adelia in the midst of the uncovering of truth in legend. :]
The story begins in the year 1154 A.D., when a cathedral-destroying earthquake strikes Glastonbury, England, creating a fissure in the earth—where the alleged remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere’s bodies would be found. Twenty years later, King Henry II fights to gain his lands in Wales—against a people who don’t recognize him as King, believing that King Arthur (who lived in the 6th century) is still alive. Henry thus summons Adelia away from her otherwise normal life to investigate the truth of Arthur’s bones—and, he hopes, to prove to the Welsch that their so-called King had long ago died.
Adelia is traveling with Lady Emma Wolvercote (the abbey choirgirl in Book II, raped by the late Lord Wolvercote), when the King’s men arrive to take her off course. Arriving in Glastonbury, she and her manservant Mansur (officially, the “doctor,” to save Adelia from ignorant accusations of witchcraft), are greeted by the abbot, whom, with suspicious openness, allows them to inspect the remains of the alleged bones that are believed to be Arthur and Guinevere’s. As expected, there would be those resistant to the discovery of the truth behind the bones, and our heroes thus narrowly escape death several times from attempts to put them off.
Although once a woman baffled and embarassed by how others could sacrifice their life for the love of a man, Adelia—on the brinks of death by aphyxiation with Rowley in a sealed tunnel—finds that she would be ready to do that for Rowley. Our heroine and her beloved survive, of course, but the incident would set about a course of confessions and revelations that would explain both Arthur’s bones and the relations between several unlikely parties in this small town.
Ripe with both historical and forensics details, the novel entertains and educates without detracting much from the story. Most memorable is a touching conversation in a rose-garden in summer between Adelia and Emma on love and circumstances, wherein Adelia, in her pedantic nature, goes off a tangent discussing historical contraceptions, notably venerable pessaries soaked in vinegar. Another interesting fact revealed in the story is that preserves or Worcestershire sauce are the best means to clean historic swords preserved in muck—this was used to reveal that a rusted sword that had saved Adelia’s life was, in fact, Excaliber. But, though the story is lovely at times, it is a work of fiction. Although Henry II was reportedly its owner at one point during his reign, no one now knows where Excaliber is; the author admits in the endnote that the dates of certain events are shifted to render them in accords with other events. Nevertheless, who’s to say things didn’t happen as they did? Even the study of history in academia is prone to changes, as new findings challenge existing notions.
Interestingly, unlike its predecessors, Book III ends in suspense—as one of the villains Adelia narrowly escapes in the woods looks on at her passing in menace…
While many mediocre stories have used the crutch of recycling a famous plot, I honestly believe the forced adaption of Hamlet was the greatest tragedy in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. [Then again, I read it in part because it’s a Hamlet-derivative (and fiction of that nature is a requisite on my reading list), and in part because it’s a top 10 New York Times Bestseller. Though it butchered the story, I suppose the forced adaption helped marketing.]
Until Part III, the story was largely extremely pastoral–which could be insanely boring to some, but then, that was the nature and substance of the story–the “personality” of the story, so to speak, was slow and lumbering and went about (in horrid depths) pretty much everything about Edgar and Trudy. I think I might have been content reading a long drawn-out “slice of life” novel that just went about the everyday more-or-less eventless (other than farm stuffs) lives of these people and their amazing (but fictional) dogs — dogs smart enough to read sign language. I truly grew to love these characters, although the novel dragged on, and unlike other novels, I never shed a tear for any of them (even when pretty much everyone dies in the end–it’s a Hamlet-wannabe, you expected that!). The sudden change in Part III with the forced “inciting incident” of Edgar (Hamlet) discovering the death of his father being foul play — a needle, as delivered by his Uncle Claude — left a bad taste in my mouth, and after that, my goal was just to finish the novel to find out what the hype is about and to experience the whole thing to formulate my version of what’s wrong with the novel.
Suffice it to say, the novel’s popularity has probably less to do with the writing and more to do with its subject and its rather unique setting–the hundred acre woods, the farm of the Sawtelles and their very specially-bred dogs, and the remarkable boy who can’t speak (but can hear) but manages to communicate and bond with these dogs — and the reader — on a decently deep level. (Again, it’s not a profound level in that I didn’t cry in his demise–or that of any character’s. Edgar had “bartered with his own life” to be with the people he loved–and I was like, “Oh, well, that seems like something a confused teenager might conclude at.” I didn’t cry. And I’m horribly sentimental. So, the novel didn’t quite pass in the emotional dept.)
There are scenes in the first part of the novel that are memorable because of their clearly supernatural aura; it’s a realistic setting thus far, and yet you have characters who seem not just creepy but of-an-inhuman-wisdom like Ida Paine. And there’s the eerie symbolism like the appearance and death of the wolf pup, buried next to Trudy’s stillborn. And though it’s a farm, little is mentioned of the death of the dogs on the farm, and yet death is nearby. The portrayal of Trudy’s wish for a child is made even more poignant with the scene with that trail of blood from the bedroom to the bathroom, where she and her stillborn sat in the tub soaked in blood–it could have been taken from a horror story, and yet you can see it from her perspective and also the human beauty in the tragic scene. And Edgar’s birth, her distress at the docs not finding anything wrong with him, and yet Edgar being unable to speak though he had all the physical wirings for it. You can sympathize with the characters, and though nothing really happens to them until the last third of the book, you’re kind of happy just reading about them.
The novel’s portrayal of the perspective of the dogs is poetic and nearly brilliant. Almondine’s view progresses from that of a naive dog to that of a truly poetic being in her finale. She has a tendency to try speaking to inanimate objects; before Edgar’s arrival, she’d tried asking these objects for the secret they seemed to know - and which is revealed to her on Edgar’s arrival; and in her finale, knowing Edgar had gone, she’d tried speaking to the angry “traveller” (car).
The novel has these uncanny sparks of symmetry: the two graves that preceded Edgar’s birth and the two graves that preceded his death ; cars as being vessels leading to trouble in Claude’s driving lesson and then Henry’s drive to town ; Essay’s reluctance to be cowed by danger in both the tornado and fire scene, but only relents when she realizes in the latter, it’s Edgar’s choice.
(The POV of each Hamlet-canonical analogue is also interesting. Possibly helpful in studies of those characters (especially for theatre) as a different and specific modern-ish persona to explore each character analogue. Especially the likelihood of Hamlet being a delusional teenager who’s talented in expressing himself in words, and yet can’t quite communicate his inner depth to the people closest to him. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark = The Tale of Edgar Sawtelle Analogies: Almondine = Ophelia ; Trudy = Gertrude ; Claude = Claudius; Dr P = Polonius ; Glenn = Laertes ; “Call of the Wild [what reclaims the dogs, or the Sawtelle Legacy] = Norway; “Sawtelle Farm” = Denmark; Starchild Colony = England ; Forte = Fortinbras; Essay = Horatio ; Tinder & Baboo = Rosencrantz & Guildenstern [?])
I guess the novel regains its own “self” (somewhat?) in the end, when the Sawtelle dogs run free after Edgar’s passing. That they were tied to Edgar, that Forte represented the wild, and Essay, the link.
But, the novel isn’t poetic enough to pass as a poetry novel, and parts of it (the parts that dragged, the parts that seemed jarringly non sequitur — as if another writer had taken on the job without reading the beginning) just screams out, “I NEED TO BE EDITED (and swiped and torn apart)”–so ultimately, the reading itself was a tragedy. I’m sorry. But, at least the dogs are out and free - and we’ll always love the dogs.
Written by ina on Sunday, 14 of December , 2008 at 11:14 pm Tags: Twilight
Earlier tonight, I officially finished reading Book 4 (Breaking Dawn) of the Twilight Saga!
While some I know are horrified that I’ve immersed myself in this (derivative/juvenile/fleeting/genre/pulp fiction/romance) series, I think I have to admit I side with the masses on this–I love Twilight!
Shallow in mythos, yes. (Pathological to all “light vamp” novels after Anne Rice {and, perhaps, all vamp novels after A.R.}, practically all mythos is Anne-Rice derivative. From mythos of the first shapeshifters [recall Body Thief] to “Renesmee,” [recall Witching Hour]) Deja vu-ish in your stereotypical vampire male lover being Victorian-esque and speaking with that sort of cordiality, yes. (It is a romance.) Vampires who don’t have sharp vampire teeth, per se, but just really strong jaws (Almost as strange as Joss Whedon vampires with their dramatized stage faces.) Stereotypical rift between vampires and werewolves (not quite like Underworld, though, as these werewolves are actually Native American shapeshifters who gain the trait genetically and can’t infect others.) Glowy eyes! (And they don’t usually wear contacts even though they try to blend in among humans.)
But, as I mentioned earlier, Book 1’s magic is that it’s totally soft-core, and yet you become immersed in the world and totally get to understand Bella Swan as you connect to her by reminiscing your similar (and-yet-so-different) high school experience; you can tell so much love went into writing it for the author to keep both the soft-core piousness in with a perfect but not-nauseating amount of suspense. Book 2’s fault is that it doesn’t tailor to the target audience; you simply can’t give someone who wants to read a vamp novel (and who’s already in love with the lead vamp) 350 pages of werewolf-esque lore. I suppose the devout fan (me?) would trudge through all that just to see what would happen (the official way it’s supposed to happen!), but the development amounts to a very painful sort of can’t-stop-reading (nauseating) suspense–in a way, something of a cheap trick equivalent to forcing the reader to keep reading on behalf of a certain vampiric hostage. Book 3 was ok, but the writing seems very rushed; much of it just doesn’t seem smooth. Book 4 relies on an existing fanhood; you have to be in love with Bella and/or Edward to read through the first half, and while the plotting of the second half is more coherent, the ending is actually happy and just (to an extent).
Basically, you love the characters and you can’t resist falling in love with the saga and smiling giddily through even its myriad outrageous scenes. Not to mention, there is always a very pious air that, to your delighted surprise, actually holds out (What you don’t come to expect of a vampire novel - literally no sex for Bella and Edward until they’re formally and big-grand-wedding wed… in Book 4, which is 750 pages long — longest of the volumes, and perhaps originally intended to be something other than a young adult book(?)! Mad props! Skill?
Although you notice that Meyer almost never has more than two people to a dialogue, the usage of the special gifts of certain supernatural characters as literary tools is definitely exploited–most evidently, Edward’s ability to read anyone’s mind (but Bella’s) effectively allows his dialogue to serve as that of an omnipotent narrator’s. The Cullen family vampires have talents that make them nearly stereotypical: Jasper like a Carebear (he can quite seriously emote!); Alice like a Cassandra of sort (or Go Ask Alice!); Edward like the vampire of the Rococo-type romances who can see through everyone’s thoughts but the one person’s. The blending of talents into the characters isn’t always seamless, but I think they were well introduced - found it pretty easy to associate each member with his or her talent after just a casual introduction to each in Book 1 (but I’m told that’s a girl thing).
I have to admit I love the denoument to Book 4’s finale (the buildup is interseting-esque; Aro’s deliberations is tainted [agreed]). I really wish RL political antagonism that’s on the breaking dawn of war could end so passively–that victory could be without a fight. (Then again, how would you make a true-to-book ending for a movie based on Book 4’s actual ending? What would the fans–especially the ones who haven’t read the book–think, after getting all spiffed up for a fight, when they all just leave, and the seemingly-winning side cheers despite missing the fight?)
Then again, did Meyer really mean “The End” at the end of Book 4 - the Volturi are sure to do something in the near future about this unexpected threat, perhaps send a spy or something (or maybe the priceless antique necklace Aro gave Bella has some curse that makes it the magical equivalent of a tape recorder — ok, stretch, interesting the actual mythos isn’t that crazy yet)? Suffice it to say, lots of fun fan fiction possibilities ahead…
On Monday, my Twilight books from Amazon arrived two days ahead of schedule, so Monday night, I started reading Twilight (I’m still young enough that several friends made me swear to read it before watching the movie). Stole some time today to finish reading it earlier this evening.
I think the thing I love about Twilight is that it’s a page-turner, but it’s not a “I have to finish reading it before I can stop” novel - you can actually step back and muse about the characters, and it doesn’t use the usual glitz and sham tricks of sex and gratuitous violence other suspense novels use. And it’s actually not horrible, the trips down memory lane (cc high school era) the novel invokes — it makes you think about these events, and they become more real as you associate them with your own experience (or inexperience) in the era…
Yes, so, truly I find the novel brilliant in that it manages to achieve the essence of a #1 NY Times Bestselling book without losing the virtues of a wholesome good read.
Re: Vamp novels - yes, I’ve read Anne Rice Vamp Chronicles (main canon at least - till Memnoch and then most of Armand, could never finish reading Pandora and others; agreed, first-draft-ish; also loved Witching Hour, so I’m actually lax with regards to editing), and no, I’m not saying that the Twilight mythos can compare to Anne (and, in fact, everything after Anne’s series in the 1970s/80s is derivative). Relative to vamp novels, I’d say that Twilight does have a few novelties. For one, I’ve yet to encounter a non-movie vampire story that’s set near an Indian reservation in Washington (and thus waving werewolves, lightly, into the mythos). Another thing is… it really is thrilling to have your protagonist be an ordinary girl in high school in love with someone she finds impossible, and who even admits his existence shouldn’t have been possible — I suppose that’s something many of us have personally experienced, and we’re luversallcrazy in that it’s working out, and we’re bonding with her (despite the nuances of our different experiences). Twilight is in some respects a formula novel–its language is very plain; several chapters actually described day-to-day experiences of a high school student (and yet they do help establish the setting by taking us down memory lane recast in the novel’s world)… and yet it works similar to how Harry Potter works in that though the protagonist has a formidable sense of morality and altruism, she’s not heroic like Lestat (which would require a different formula), but she’s something most people can be, and we can relate to many facets of her by virtue of our common traits. (And, who wouldn’t want to suddenly move to a new school district, albeit a log-cabin-esque smalltown, and become something like a star in status.)
A 25-year old American polymath of Taiwanese ancestry pretending to be old and Caucasian in Second Life. Semi-retired independent scholar also dabbling as an independent artist in new media, particularly theatre and the humanities—notably Shakespeare. Programmer, playwright and novelist. Formal academic background in http://portfolio.inacentaur.com/ina/scientist, philosophy, and bioengineering.
This is largely a personal blog which isn't always up-to-date. There's no one definitive way to stalk me ;-).
