Sense of Adventure

Of course the original Allman Bros. quote is, “Dreams I’ll never see.”

And these, frankly, have a bit of ambivalence for me. Some parts I’d like to see. Others less.

I didn’t sleep too well last night, for no reason I can perceive; I kept waking up and staying awake, but not long enough to make it worthwhile to just say screw it and read or write. Just enough to cost me rest.

But in between I had a series of dreams I found pretty intriguing. I’ve had a lot of vivid and unusual dreams lately.

In this case, I dreamed I was involved in making a movie of The Cybernetic Shogun, little-known sequel to my Prometheus Award winning Cybernetic Samurai. It seemed to be the near-future. I relived various scenes and sections of the book - some that are authentically there, others that I never really wrote. But they seemed to fit.

Of course that may’ve just been dream logic. We all know how that song goes.

That’s the part, you likely figured out on your own (being the smart, perceptive people my bloggers readers naturally would be!), I hoped I would see.

Less so - much less so - were the dream segments in which I seemed actually to be living in the world of Cybernetic Shogun. How you like your fantasy now, monkey boy?

For those who haven’t read it, which is most of the world (it only ever came out in a pricey hardbound edition, which was naturally not promoted by the publisher to any degree visible without a scanning-tunneling microscope) Shogun takes place after a fourth World War, which basically concludes Samurai. Neither this Big One nor its predecessor are the junk fiction peddled by the War Socialists - they involve serious exchanges of thermonuclear warheads. (Neither involves “nuclear winter,” the power-lusters’ hoax du jour before global warming.)

In Shogun, MUSASHI and HIDETADA, the “offspring” of the first novel’s protagonist TOKUGAWA - the world’s first artificial consciousness - battle it out for control over what’s left of the world. Meanwhile human protagonists act as their puppets - while also fighting both a rabid (if maybe not altogether unjustifiable) anti-technology crusade and an army of Stalinists.

Not so comfortable a place to live, I’m thinking.

Then again, it’s looking as if the consensus reality we mostly inhabit might not be so comfortable here soon. But that’s a subject for another rant. Or not.

Meanwhile - I prefer to look toward a future in which a Cybernetic Shogun movie becomes a happy reality. Oddly, I’d never so much as thought of that possibility before. A Samurai flick has been bruited about often, and even most kindly pushed at one point by Brian Thomsen, who while an editor of mine did not edit or work for the publisher of Samurai - that was David Hartwell and Arbor House.

We’ll see. Shogun might actually prove easier to adapt to the screen than Samurai.

And there’s always the bubbling possibility of a movie of The Guardians. I think it would rock. So do a lot of people who are kind enough to write me fan emails about the series, a decade and a half after the last one came out…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Life, Me, My Pubs, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.