Zap zap bang bang

By now four thousand people have told me about the shooting at the Playstation 3 launch. Well, all right, it wasn’t four thousand. It was sixteen. Fifteen, if you don’t count the guy who thought it was over an XBox. (I love it when people remember everything about a marketing promotion except the product. Just knowing that some marketing executive signed off on a million-dollar campaign only to boost his competition gives me a warm feeling inside.)

Not that I’m saying Sony deliberately engineered a stock shortage and then hired an assassin to shoot someone in the stampede in order to build up the hype. That would be unspeakably immoral. To rip off the opening of Jennifer Government so blatantly, I mean.

I’m thinking about creating a special section on this site: “Stuff that happened in real life that’s kind of like one of Max’s books.” That way I won’t feel the need to salute each individual event: I can just add it to the list. Then on cold, quiet nights when I’m feeling insecure, I can browse that list and feel good about myself again. The best part is there need never be a list of “Things that were predicted in one of Max’s books and, boy, was he off-base.” Those things just haven’t come true yet.

Of course, it’s not that hard to predict advances in marketing. You just imagine what you’d do if you wanted to sell something and had absolutely no morals, self-respect, or dignity. Wait six months, and bing! There it is.

[Jennifer Government] [link] [22 comments]

It begins

Now you know I hate blowing my own trumpet every time something happens in the real world that’s straight out of one of my books. Well, maybe “hate” is too strong a word. I mean, “enjoy on a deep, almost sexual level.” Yeah. That’s more like it.

Anyway, I think this one is worth mentioning because it’s at the more extreme end: it’s that thing in Jennifer Government where everyone takes their surname from their employer. John Nike. Billy NRA. Violet ExxonMobil. And so on.

There’s a historical precedent for this: in centuries past, John Smith was the town blacksmith, Tim Baker really was a baker, and Geoff Wang was… well, let’s not think. In the Jennifer Government world, where a person’s job is the most important thing about them, returning to that concept made sense to me. Also, when I worked in sales, I’d get a call from “Michael Jamieson” or whoever, and frantically think, “Jamieson, Jamieson… who the hell is that?” It would have been so much simpler if he was “Michael McDonald’s.”

Now, we’ve already seen people selling their surnames to corporations, and even a particularly disturbing case of parents auctioning naming rights to their baby. But does it really count as a fulfilled prophesy when the people doing the fulfilling are missing some essential part of their brain? I dunno. I think that’s a little like saying, “I foresee a day when people will smack themselves in the face with hammers for fun,” and then claiming it came true because of my cousin Donny. Poor Donny. Well, you pity his parents, mostly. But back to the issue. For me to feel like I really nailed this one, it has to be done in all seriousness. Nobody should even see anything wrong with it.

So here we are. Lately companies have been stampeding into Second Life, a virtual reality of the kind that everyone thought the internet would be, before discovering it was just typing and clicking on links. In Second Life, you create an avatar—a little person to be—and run around… um, doing stuff. You know, like walking around… or going shopping… or building a house. But without having to stand up.

So. The news agency Reuters just opened an office there and assigned reporter Adam Pasick to the beat. So now there’s an avatar that looks like Adam in Second Life, reporting on news. Only what’s his name? Adam Reuters.

Oh yes. Innocuous. That’s how it starts.

[Jennifer Government] [link] [14 comments]

Superman Redux

Okay, this is too funny not to mention. I offered to send some signed books to Kurt Busiek—the writer who put Jennifer Government in Clark Kent’s hands in Action Comics #838—and he kindly sent me some of his stuff in return.

Included in the stack of goodies that arrived on my doorstop was a signed copy of that issue—with this modified cover.

[Jennifer Government] [link] [20 comments]

Look! Up in the top left panel! It’s….

Okay, let me just get my breath. All right. The other day—no, wait, I need another minute.

Okay. Okay. I’m just going to say it: in the latest issue of Action Comics, Clark Kent is reading Jennifer Government.

Action Comics is the series that introduced Superman in 1938. And now he’s reading my book.

This is possibly the greatest moment of my life.

Just before I left Australia, I noticed I had a couple of emails with odd subject lines, like “Superman reads Jennifer Government.” But I had a plane to catch and didn’t get around to reading these for a couple of weeks. Then I was sure that it couldn’t be true, that maybe Clark was reading a book that just looked a bit like one of mine if you turned the page upside down and squinted, because… well, it just couldn’t be. But if that was happening, a lot of people seemed to be doing it.

So I emailed DC Comics, pausing only briefly to wipe the drool from my keyboard, and soon had not only confirmation that this extraordinary event had actually come to pass, but a fascinating (and flattering) explanation as to how:

I’m glad you enjoyed the bit — I’m Kurt Busiek, co-writer of that issue, and the guy who violated copyright on your book cover for my own nefarious purposes. The idea, mostly, was that in the past, whenever Clark mentions reading anything, he almost invariably mentions Dickens or Austen or some other long-dead writer that the audience knows from being forced to read them in high school lit class. Since Clark’s supposed to be in his early thirties, I want him to come across like a reasonably young guy, not like your college professor’s dad (and I say that as a big Jane Austen fan; it ain’t the quality, it’s the image). So I wanted Clark to be reading something current, interesting and smart. Something that made him look like he’s part of this century and knows what’s good.

I’m not ashamed to admit that this made me giggle like a schoolgirl who just found the penis pictures in her biology textbook.

My new goal is to land a poster-sized copy, so I can frame it and hang it somewhere conspicuous, like on the front of my house. I mean, Superman! Superman!

[Jennifer Government] [link] [43 comments]