The Dark Knight Strikes Back, Forward

To continue my sad little DKSB analysis: Lots of things feel arbitrary in it. Why is Green Lantern living on some other world as a green blobby thing with a family? (I'm willing to accept that the GBTs are part of some Green Lantern backstory I'm not familiar with, but the question remains: Who are these people/things and why should I care?) Why is Robin now wearing a ridiculous cat outfit? Why is Lex Luthor a lot like Kingpin? How did he and the regular human world manage to get rid of all the superheroes in the first place? Especially considering that the day is saved, at least partly, by Green Lantern literally holding the planet in his hand. How do you stop someone like that from doing whatever wants? Most jarring of all, what is up with Dick Grayson?

I did like playing Spot the TV News Pundit. And Superman's Amazon-raised daughter was interesting; I wish there had been more with her.

Batman should be a very interesting character to put into a post-9/11 type situation. His whole deal is that the state cannot be trusted to effectively wield power, at least in the arena of crime. And terrorism is as much crime as it is war. In both DKR and DKSB Batman organizes armies out of the masses, to either attack the state or do a job the state is unwilling or incapable of doing. Meanwhile, in this story, Superman is turned into the ultimate expression of the power of the state. So there's a fascist vs. communist element to things. Kind of. In theory.

I should have taken better notes.

Re: The Zenith Angle: I saw Bruce Sterling at the University of Washington bookstore, and after his reading someone observed that, as a regular reader of his weblog and other nonfiction writings, many of the elements in the novel felt obvious. That is, that there was a sense of glimpsing the man behind the curtain. Here is his interest in Bollywood, his interest in industrial design, here's that Spacewar article he wrote for Wired. And having read it, this is true, to some extent. I didn't feel that this made the novel less worth reading, though I can see how it might be. There followed an interesting discussion on whether anyone would bother reading (or writing) novels in the future. Or, more likely, whether anyone would bother paying for them. Sterling said he did not know. I should have raised my hand and mentioned how William Gibson quit his blog when it came time to write another novel, because he felt that the former activity somehow satisfied the urges that drove the latter, and what Bruce Sterling thought of this, but I didn't, because I was totally intimidated, really. I have not met many people that I (for better or worse) idolize. The only options I could imagine were complete silence on my part or crushing embarrassment when I opened my mouth. "Dude, I am so writing my undergraduate philosophy thesis about things you talk about! Tomorrow Now is, like, a source! I'm all over your approach!" Awful, I think we can all agree. (Especially since "I am writing" would have been, at best, a gross exaggeration. [On using Google to spellcheck "exaggeration," I find: "Looking for Exaggeration? Find it on eBay!" Thanks, adbots.])

Oh, and one more thing: DKSB just isn't subtle. Freedom from Information Act? Like, neat, but I get it already. I got it awhile back. As the concretizing of a metaphor it is OK, I guess, but not as an example of actual creepy legislative naming, since what it is in opposition to is so obvious.