Review: John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption

You may remember Ron Jockman (fictional) as the author of the outstanding (but also fictional) John Rockman and the Trials of Galactar. Ron is the creation of brothers Justin and Mitchell Lucas, who decided to one-up the entire parody genre by parodying not just bad books, but the bad authors who write them. In their words, Ron is, “socially inept, selfish, misogynistic, opinionated, and an awful writer.” His id is a tangled yarn-ball of insecurity and pretentiousness, forever pawed at by the drunken kitten of his ego.

And now he’s back with the second book in the Rockman trilogy, John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption. But does Cosmic Brain match the awkward hilarity of Trials of Galactar?

In four words: yes it does… buddy. Cosmic Brain is a witty, observant parody, filled with the same brilliantly bad writing you loved in the previous book.

          Rockman was fifty percent resolve and fifty percent more resolve. He awaited some very personal information from his troubled companion. He was also ten percent sternness.

This time around, Rockman teams up with Niah, a brilliant cyborg cyberneticist whom Rockman is in no way sexually attracted to, even though Niah’s the exact sort of man Rockman would be attracted to, if he was attracted to men (which he certainly isn’t.)  Together, they battle space-chameleons, face their personal space-demons, and are forced—by circumstance alone—to space-kiss each other.

Working against them are a rogue’s gallery of roguish rogues, who do all kinds of roguish things to demonstrate how roguey and undefeatable they are. And then, of course, they get defeated by Rockman. There’s always a bigger fish, you see, and if Rockman was a fish, that fish would be Rockman.

          Rockman was right next to his ear. He whispered into that ear. “You were trained well, but your training is outdated. Always keep up on the things that interest you. Never stop learning.” With that, Rockman sliced Davitt into two equal pieces.

The Lucases’ love of science fiction is clear from their extensive knowledge of bad-author tropes, but Cosmic Brain is not an affectionate parody. Unlike typical science fiction parodies, most of which come from a place of love, Cosmic Brain comes from a place of unrepentant mockery, which I have named Mockghanistan.

If you remember, my one big complaint with Trials of Galactar was that it got a bit mired in Mockghanistan. I wouldn’t say the mire quagged, but there was indeed mire, if only because too much sarcasm becomes wearying. Cosmic Brain, on the other hand, is a much smoother read. I believe this is because Ron Jockman’s various authorial tics are blended and spaced more evenly in this book. Parts of Trials of Galactar felt like an unrelenting onslaught of goofy science, thesaurus-porn, or Rockman-worship. Cosmic Brain mixes up its comedic elements to better effect, giving the reader a rest from one while indulging another.

          Rockman felt like that hook right about then. He felt like a flimsy hook that couldn’t do its job. Rockman didn’t believe in himself anymore and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep himself and the General alive. Also, like these hooks, he was holding onto something heavy: guilt of so many dead lives he couldn’t save. It was pulling at him.
          “Well, there is another way to get back to Wret’s ship…” the General whispered. Rockman spun to General Steven. “What is it?! We need to hurry!” Just then a bang and a slam signified something big was heading down the hall towards the kitchen.
          Rockman was hooked on surviving, so since he was still holding the General by the sweaty-firm hand, he pulled him behind a cabinet that was next to a counter the entire time. He smirked at the hook pun a little bit, even though, overall, the hook analogy was more bad than good.

I can heartily recommend John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption. If you enjoy a good parody, science fiction or otherwise, I think you’ll find it fresh and funny. Cosmic Brain follows the events of Trials of Galactar, but stands well enough on its own, so the books can be enjoyed out of order.

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John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption is available in e-book format from Amazon for $2.99. The first book of the trilogy, John Rockman and the Trials of Galactar, is also available from Amazon, at the same price. Sample chapters can be found at those links, and either book can be borrowed for free if you’re an Amazon Prime member.

As always, I receive no holo-commissions or space-kickbacks when you follow those links.

Tomorrow, I have a special treat for you. I’ll be interviewing Ron Jockman himself, live on this blog. Except that it won’t be live and he’s not a real person. Nevertheless, I’m as excited as a Worfen-Torf in Slorfing season.

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 4

It's now 2.1 billion years ago, in the Rhyacian Period of the Proterozoic Eon, and the planet is finally thawing out from the 300 million year ice age triggered by those cyanobacterial bastards.

Things are getting back to normal, here in Toronto. I mean, the land is still a barren desert, devoid of life except for those desert crusts we saw earlier, but at least the coasts are regaining a bit of their sparkle. Let’s take a walk along the beach, shall we?

We can see that the algal mats are back, albeit as a cyanobacteria monoculture and not the beautiful, multicolored ecosystems we saw when we first got here. Ah, but what happens when we look at a water droplet under the cartoon microscope?

With the cartoon microscope (which has lower resolution but better clarity than the regular microscope,) we can see that an incredible development has occurred, probably sometime within the past 400 million years. The cell on the right is a prokaryote. These have been around since before we got to the Proterozoic Eon. The cyanobacteria in those algal mats are all prokaryotes.

But the cell on the left is something new. It's a eukaryote, a more complex cell that's larger, with internal structures (called organelles) specialized to particular tasks. You may be tempted to think of them as more evolved than the prokaryotes, but that's your own eukaryotic biases talking. In this time, the eukaryote is nothing but a curious niche organism. Its complexity and size slows down its reproduction cycle, leaving it unable to keep up with the sleeker, more efficiently growing prokaryotes. And all those specialized organelles? No doubt they can be an advantage, but they're also something else that can go wrong. Consequently, these new eukaryotes are more sensitive to heat, cold, and dessication, meaning they can't live in many of the harsh environments that prokaryotes are fine with. So you won't be seeing any eukaryotes colonizing the land, like prokaryotes have. Not for a very long time.

It may seem strange that these, our ancestors, don't hold a special place on planet Earth, but that's just not how evolution works. Evolution isn't striving for complexity. Rather, complexity is more like a byproduct produced as life gropes into unfilled niches.

In the long, long history of life on Earth, complexity has been punished more often than it's been rewarded. Even in modern times, in the golden age of eukaryotes, simple prokaryotic life is far more prevalent than eukaryotes. Prokayrotes may not be as flashy as eukaryotes, but you don't have to go far to find them. Take a close look at your own body, and you'll find a hundred trillion bacteria living in and on it. That's ten times the number of your own eukaryotic cells. So, even inside our own skins, we're still a niche organism.

But these eukaryotes, back here in the Proterozoic? These eukaryotes are gonna make it. They're going to survive—somehow or other—and evolve into even more specialized forms, and their descendants will in turn branch out to become every plant, animal, and fungus on modern-day Earth.

As we place them back into the water—very, very carefully, mind you—we notice strange formations dotting the bacterial mat below the surface. What the hell are those things?

No, they're not the rude artistic endeavors of the cyanobacteria, although that would fit right into the usual habits of those little bastards. These are collections of cells that seem to be forming a sort of multicellular structure. They may be prokaryote or eukaryote. We're not sure, and we can't check, because the cartoon microscope's batteries are dead.

Now, communal living isn't exactly unknown here. The bacterial mats are communities of cells. If not for those pesky eukaryote biases, we might even consider the mats a multicelluar organism. The bacteria in them do exhibit a kind of ad-hoc specialization, exchanging chemical signals and altering their habits to better support the mat. But they can't form the sort of complex structures that eukaryotic cells are uniquely capable of.

But if these formations are made of eukaryotes, and if they're purposefully growing into those complex structure, that would make them the first organized multicellular structures to appear on Earth¹. In the modern era, there's hot debate on the subject. We could have settled the matter right here and now, of course, if you'd only remembered to turn the lamp off on the cartoon microscope.

Nice one.

Well, that's the most interesting thing that’s going to happen around here for a while, so maybe we should get back to that Monopoly tournament.

Okay, after four more games of Monopoly, we've wiled away 400 million years. It's now 1.9 to 1.8 billion years ago and something interesting is finally about to happen. You might want to cover your ears.

You hear that deafening shockwave, and feel that wave of superheated air that’s vaporizing your skin? Yeah, that’s the Sudbury Basin impact event. It’s a meteor that just hit Ontario, making an impact crater over a hundred and fifty miles across. That’s bigger than the crater made by the meteor that will finish off the dinosaurs in a couple billion years. The Sudbury impact rivals even the largest impact in the geological record, which occurred in what will become Africa while we were playing Monopoly. Remember the ash cloud that choked out the sun for a thousand years while you were busy buying up Baltic Avenue? Yeah, that was what that was.

So, yeah. You should definitely put some aloe on that.

This impact occurred so far back that we can't easily estimate the damage it caused to life on Earth, the way we can with later impacts. We don't know how many species it wiped out, and we're not likely to resolve the matter now, since our flesh has been incinerated and our bones buried beneath layers of ash, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say this impact was nasty. It probably killed the majority of organisms on Earth, and caused the extinction of uncountable species.

So, more Monopoly?

Over our next few games, the archipelagos in the Proterozoic sea are going to drift together. The tectonic plate that we’re buried in will run into a bunch of others, and they’ll fuse together along the margins to form one giant plate called Laurentia, or the North American plate. This isn’t just normal continental drift, mind you. Continental plates bounce off each other all the time. This is the formation of a new, much bigger plate, and it will stick together until the modern era. Most of the big continental plates we have today, in fact, will be fusing together from smaller plates within the next few hundred million years. Then all those plates will come together (without permanently fusing) to form a supercontinent called variously Columbia, Nuna, or Hudsonland.

You can watch it all happen here.

But, much like The Eagles, the supercontinent Columbia is going to split up again over our next few games of Monopoly.

Now it’s 1.2 billion years ago, and sex has just been invented.

WELL IT TOOK LONG ENOUGH, DIDN’T IT?

Well, saying sex has just been invented is a little conceited. Bacteria have been having sex for a long time, probably from the very beginning. But they don’t do it the same way we do. They just kind of shoot genes at each other, and if they’re good genes, they tend to stick around. The kind of sex that involves gametes coming together to make a third distinct organism, the kind of sex you’re most likely to regret, is what’s just been invented.

Well, actually there’s a caveat there, too. Because we don’t know if they just now invented it, but this is the earliest we’ve noticed it in the fossil record. And here it is:

Wait, I don’t think that’s right. Here are the actual pictures of the first known evidence of sex:

From: Butterfield. Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: implications

for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/

Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes. Paleobiology v. 26 no. 3 p. 386-404.

Wow, that’s hot. I’m surprised we didn’t have to blur those photographs of primordial sex organs.

Sex is a big deal. Without sex, even multicellular organisms can really only clone themselves, budding off little packets of cells to float away and form a genetically identical organism somewhere else. But with sex, you can blend your genes with someone else’s—preferably someone cool. No, really. That really is one of the primary advantages of sexual reproduction: you can pick someone with awesome genes, which will help carry the slack of your crappy genes. And, while these early multicelled eukaryotes couldn’t exactly pick and choose their partners—it was pretty much down to whoever’s gametes happened to float past—they at least got a partner who was a proven survivor.

Are proterozoic lifeforms ready for sex, though? Or will this entire eon turn into one big cautionary tale? We'll find out next time...

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If you liked this article, check out the other Proterozoic and general science articles at our handy Archives.

Citations and References

1. El Albani, et al. Large Colonial Organisms with Coordinated Growth in Oxygenated Environments 2.1 Gry ago. Nature 466, 100-104 (01 July 2010)

Tips for When You Go Camping With Werewolves

It would have been such a nice visit to the woods, if not for them. They came in, they tore your cabin apart, they drank all your beer, and they ripped your belly open to feast upon your delicious entrails.

They're werewolves, and they can ruin any camping trip. But you can protect yourself from these and other feral shapeshifters, if you only follow these handy tips...

Any Port in the Storm (Will Eat Your Lungs)

If some terrifying beast is stalking you through the woods, and you just happen to come across a nice lady who gives you shelter in her cabin—her cabin in the monster-infested woods, where she's all alone, because the rest of the family is “gone for the weekend?”

You need art!

Americans (and also lesser peoples) require more art in their lives.

"I know," I hear you saying, "but the only art in my life is this drawing of the treasury building on a ten dollar bill, the eagles on these two quarters, and whatever the hell's on the back of a dime. Roosevelt's houseplants or something. How am I going to get any real art?"

The answer, my friend, is that you already have everything you need to get a sketch commissioned by Emily Camissa, the talented artist who created the banner art for this very website.

Just clutch that $10.60 in your sweaty hand and e-mail emilycamissa@gmail.com. You can also get further details right here.

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 3

 Adapted from an image Copyright and CC Martyn Gorman

Last time in the Proterozoic Eon, we were playing Monopoly to pass an epoch or ten. And it looks like you've just about bankrupted me. Masterful use of Broadway and Park Place. Now just let me check the time… Yup, like a typical game of Monopoly, that one took a hundred million years.

So now it's 2.4 billion years ago, and we're on the beach in Toronto. Let’s take a look around, shall we?

You may remember that I promised you an environmental catastrophe, but you can be forgiven for not seeing it. Looking around here, it seems that the bacterial mats are thicker and greener than ever. The land is a barren wasteland that looks more like Mars than Earth, but it was like that before the disaster. The only big change is that the sea bed and a lot of the shore has turned a cool shade of red. So where's the catastrophe?

When You Have Vampires, Part 2

So you followed all the tips in the previous guide, and you still can't get rid of those pesky vampires? Well, hold onto your blood, because we're back with another round of handy-dandy anti-vampirism tips. Let's begin with something that really ought to be obvious...

A Moveable Feast is Better than a Stationary One

If the vampires know where you live? GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE.

I don't understand why more vampire-targeted people don’t do this. Even getting a motel room on the other side of town is better than going back to the same house every night. I mean, it's no ironclad guarantee against exsanguination, but at least the bastards will have to put a little effort into eating you. It’s called hardening the target, jackass. Look into it.

And you know what’s even better than moving across town? Leaving the country. I mean, the country you’re in can’t be all that great anyway—it has vampires in it. So how about a nice new country on the other side of the planet? Someplace where the cost of living is low and you won’t wake up dead some morning, and then undead the next night?

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 2

Adapted from an image CC Paul Harrison

When we last left the Proterozoic Eon, it was 2.5 billion years ago and we were finally approaching the shore. It doesn’t look much like a modern beach, does it?

Those rocky protrusions in the tidal zone are stromatolites. They’re a little like coral, in that they're made by microorganisms and grow over centuries. But where corals are complex, multicellular organisms that build calcified structures to protect themselves, these stromatolites are made by simple bacteria—in fact, some of them are the same cyanobacteria that made those terrestrial desert crusts we saw on the way here.