SF Kapow!

The obligatory Avatar post

2010-01-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

What has not already been said about Avatar, James Cameron's new SF/action/3-D money magnet?

Visually stunning? Check.

So predictable I could have diagrammed the entire story based on the trailers? Check.

Noble savage nonsense cranked up to 11? Check.

It's almost pointless to ask if Avatar is a good movie or not, which is the first thing most people want to know, the first post-theatre question they ask each other. "Did you like it? What did you think?" The answer has to be broken down into parts.

Well, as a visual spectacle, it's of course staggeringly good. The Na'vi make Gollum look like a paper cutout being waved on the end of a stick (much as Gollum made all previous CGI characters look like finger puppets).

As an action movie it's also quite strong, and I think not enough is made of this. It's actually not that easy to make a good action movie. A dozen or so big Hollywood action flicks come out every year, and most of them contain terrible action sequences. The virus of quick cutting that infects everyone from Michael Bay to Peter Jackson annoys the crap out of me.

The dialogue, I was impressed with, even if only because I had very low expectations. There are no really memorable lines, except from Colonel HeadScars, but I'd say less than half of them were actually painful to the ear. Compare and contrast with Transformers, for example.

How about the racism? Well... if I were being very charitable, I'd say that of all the possible forms of racism that still show up in genre films, noble savage condescension is probably one of the least toxic varieties. At least it wasn't also misogynist in any notable way; Grace and Neytiri are clearly the strongest characters in the film.

I knew about the Dances With Smurfs thing going into the movie, and that didn't bother me nearly as much as the blankness of the main character. Jake Sully literally arrives in a box and is popped out as though he's an action figure being unpacked. He has about that much personality. He also seems dumb as a brick, and that's difficult to reconcile with him having an identical twin who was an accomplished scientist.

My final question about Avatar came about an hour after leaving the theatre: would this movie have pushed the buttons of my inner 10-year-old?

After I saw the original Star Wars films, or Indiana Jones, for the first time, I'd run around my back yard with my friends for weeks pretending to wield a light saber or a whip. I'm sure there are 10-year-olds out there now playing with toy wands and shouting "Expelliarmus!" or swinging wooden swords through a band of orcs. I can see my 10-year-old self wanting to be a giant, blue half-naked monkey man. On the Star Wars Kid Inspiring Scale, I give Avatar a 7 out of 10.

You never get past it, it just becomes a part of you: Dollhouse thoughts

2009-12-12T11:04:00.000-08:00

Having been kicked out of my non-blogging funk by the !Peter Watts! madness, I thought I'd get back to talking about Dollhouse. Many spoilers, etc.

So many highs, so many lows.

I've been talking about the show a lot with my girlfriend, She Who Is Awesome, and we've come to slightly different conclusions. I like Dollhouse a lot, in spite of its flaws. She's been feeling more ambivalent about it. In fact, before last night's back-to-back episodes of "Meet Jane Doe" and "A Love Supreme," she was pretty much not even going to buy the DVD of the second season.

I see her point. Dollhouse has been wildly uneven, even compared with the first and second seasons of Buffy and Angel. And Firefly, when looked at in proper order is remarkably low on filler episodes and/or craptastic ones.

So here are my complaints about Dollhouse's second season, in particular:

• Slow start. Boy, it didn't exactly get going at a good pace. It felt like we were back in client-of-the-week mode there.

• Lack of focus. After the slam-bang ending to the previous season, plus "Epitaph One," it felt like the show was on track. It wasn't a hint of what was going on, it was a friggin' roadmap. And it was a map to very cool places. The fact that we didn't immediately jump into the "Epitaph One" storyline was a bit of a letdown.

• Echo? What Echo? This is only partly a complaint. Having a blank slate as your main character is, well, kind of a weird choice. But in the first few episodes, and even in some of the better, later ones of the season, Echo is either marginalized or bounces back and forth between various states. It doesn't feel like a linear evolution from doll to fully realized person. In fact, in the first three or four episodes, it sometimes felt like they were being shown out of order, with Echo farther along in earlier shows than later ones.

But I think these flaws are compensated for by both the good that's made it onto the screen, and by the potential the writers are finally starting to mine.

Ah, potential. It's been the show's bete noir in some ways. Defenders like myself point out what an awesome, mindblowing concept the show is playing with. Those of a more critical bent point out that the potential has often been squandered in favour of "Echo's a dominatrix" jokes.

But the potential, and the way it's being realized, is the core of my defense of Dollhouse. In SF novels, you often see a single idea worked out in full, with all its myriad implications fleshed out. In TV SF? Not so much. Remember that transporter malfunction on ST:TNG that turned Picard, Guinan, Ro, et al into teenagers? Fountain of youth, or single-episode plot device never to be mentioned again? Just Star Trek alone will give you hundreds of dropped SFnal threads.

Dollhouse, however, is rigorously working out the implications of its technology. We start with programmable dolls, the Swiss army knives of the doll world. Since then we've seen post-imprinting dolls, multi-persona dolls, dolls with their own persona, upgraded. We've seen the awesome "Epitaph One," which dragged everything to its dystopian conclusion. We're seeing the technology advance, from slow imprinting to faster, all the way to distance imprinting and wiping, and how that changes the balance of power between those who control the technology, and those who are its victims.

Perfect television? No. But Dollhouse is arguably the most well thought out SF premise on television in the past several decades.

Holy shit! Peter Watts gets a beatdown!

2009-12-11T10:32:00.001-08:00

So Peter Watts may have made the mistake of arguing with some US border guards. According to Cory Doctorow, they then gave Watts a beating, charged him with assaulting a federal officer, and sent him packing into Canada in his shirtsleeves in the snow.

Now he's facing a federal felony charge in the US. Watts, for those who don't know, is the author of the fabulous Blindsight, a bleak but mindblowing novel that was nominated for a Hugo a few years back. It's available as a download thanks to its Creative Commons license.

The folks who like to grovel before authority are predictably already turning up in Boing Boing's comments. We don't know what happened, maybe he was at fault, blah blah blah. You know what? I don't even care if Watts argued with the guards, if he verbally provoked them, if he refused to follow their orders immediately. I don't for a minute believe that an SF author and former marine biologist in his forties just lunged at a border guard.

I do believe that border guards have an absurd amount of power over people. When you have that much power in one place, you've created a job that attracts bullying assholes. Not all of them, but way too many are just there to push people around and feed their piggy little egos.

I've donated $20 to Watts through his PayPal account on his website.

If, like me, you've ever been treated like dirt by some jackass of a border guard, kick in a few bucks. Free Peter Watts!

io9 responds

2009-08-01T15:40:00.001-07:00

So after I posted my little rant below about io9 and their banning Abigail Nussbaum of Asking the Wrong Questions, I sent off an email to them about the matter.

Here's the text of my message:

To the editors,

I've just read on Abigail Nussbaum's site, Asking the Wrong Questions, that she and another io9 user were banned immediately after they posted comments questioning whether the articles on District 9 were biased because it was io9's ComiCon sponsor. The link to at least one user's profile seems to show that her last comment before being banned was criticism about District 9.

I'm hoping you can provide an explanation. Until you do, I'm going to trust that Ms. Nussbaum has it right, and I won't be reading your site.

Sincerely,

[My real name]

So apparently, Charlie Jane Anders headed over to Asking the Wrong Questions and posted this:

Hi Abigail, thanks for writing about io9. Sorry I only just saw this, after someone sent us the link. To answer your points in order: We banned Oliver because he was being abusive. We have a clear policy that says that if you attack us or accuse us of not believing what we write on the site, then we will ban you. Your comment never actually appeared on the site -- when I read your comment, I thought it was Oliver coming back under another name. Someone may well have responded to your comment -- sometimes starred commenters can see unapproved comments and respond to them -- but you were never approved.

As for District 9, we saw this movie at SDCC and it blew us away. And we really did think it came into SDCC with the least buzz, and came out with the biggest increase in buzz. It would be hypocritical of us, in the extreme, not to say what we think about this movie because it's advertising on our site. We've never had any pressure to say nice things about our advertisers, and if we had, we'd ignore it. We assumed anyone who visits io9 regularly would know that we don't give special treatment to our advertisers. We hadn't been hyping District 9 much until we saw it and realized how great it was.

Thanks again for commenting about io9, and for helping keep us honest. We love your writing over at StrangeHorizons.

All best,
Charlie Jane Anders
io9.com

This doesn't really satisfy me. Whether Olliver was banned for good or bad reasons, I don't know; I do know that the last post he put up about Tron 2 and District 9 was not what I would consider remotely abusive. So it looks weird that that's the last thing he posted.

But my main problem is the io9 policy of banning people who attack them or don't believe what they read on the site. You've got to roll with the punches, if you're going to run any kind of media outlet. Right now, they just look thin-skinned and petty.

At the newspaper I work for, if someone sends us a letter or an email accusing us of bias, we run it. If we think it's particularly egregious, the editor might append a note or write a rebuttal, saying essentially what Ms. Anders said in her comment: we stand by our views, we aren't pressured by our advertisers, we call them like we see them. And if io9 had done that, openly and immediately in that comment thread or on their main page, I'd say more power to them. I believe they liked District 9. I just can't believe that they think quashing any criticism, removing posts or banning people, is the way to defend their journalistic integrity. It's not.

Oh io9, no!

2009-08-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

So I was just dipping a toe in Asking the Wrong Questions, and I find that its proprietor has become embroiled in a wee bit of a controversy with i09. Short version: i09 is promoting the hell out of District 9, a movie which actually looks pretty interesting. i09 also gave it a rave review and named it the most buzzworthy thing at ComiCon.

A couple of commenters (possibly not so politely) pointed out that this looked an awful lot like a conflict of interest, and were promptly banned.

Wow… just wow.

John Scalzi weighed in on the comment thread there and noted that it is possible for media outlets to review things that are paying their salaries. This is entirely correct. What io9 is doing, however, is the exact opposite of the way you're supposed to do it.

But let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that their opinions about District 9 are entirely on the up and up and not influenced by the wads of cash their advertising folks are getting from the film's promotion team. You do not ban people from commenting because they have noticed the possible conflict of interest.

I normally avoid any hint of my real life on this blog, but I'm going to now. I'm a reporter at a smallish suburban newspaper. This means I have many jobs, including writing a weekly column, covering local politics and crime, and sometimes writing the editorials (we sign our editorials, as they do in Quebec, by the way). When you piss people off (and you will piss people off) and they send you an angry letter, YOU PRINT IT!

Oh, I'm sorry, did I just yell? Well, maybe I'm a little ticked that io9 doesn't understand the basic rule of running a media business that says disagreement is actually good. Sure, you can delete posts and ban users, and no one will be left after a while to criticize. They will tell you how awesome you are and stroke your ego. And slowly they will slip away, and you will be an irrelevant joke.

I actually like io9. I know it exists mainly to be all ZOMG NEW IRON MAN TRAILER!!!!1!, but I like that they actually write about books on a regular basis. They even interviewed Samuel Delany a while back. It's refreshing to see a site that gets 99 per cent of its hits from people interested in the next cheap pseudo-SF blockbuster, and devotes 10 to 20 per cent of its time to talking about stories printed on dead trees. Considering how often they update, you actually get more book reviews, recommendations and author interviews out of io9 than out of almost any other SF-related site on the web.

If io9 would like to explain how their actions are anything less than petty protection of their sponsorship, I'd love to hear it.

"Caroline"

2009-07-31T07:32:00.000-07:00

This little review of Echo, the original pilot for Dollhouse, contains spoilers. Back away now and nobody gets spoiled.

I never read the script for the original pilot that was floating around out there. I guess it's part of my own spoiler-averse nature to avoid reading a script like that. Besides, what-might-have-been is profitless when it comes to TV. We have what the creator ultimately gave us, network bungling or not. So when I sat down to watch Echo last night, it was with the view that I was seeing an experiment, an early draft put down on film, an alternate world version of the characters.

Boy, I was not wrong about the alternate world part.

The basic plot sysnopsis is this: we get a whole big chunk of exposition right up front, with DeWitt narrating as we see Echo go through several missions: a pro bono drying out a young woman, a jealousy-inducing date at a wedding, and as a negotiator in a million dollar drug deal. Once that's out of the way – and we're talking a good long part of the episode here – we get into the main plot, which is once again Ballard's search for the Dollhouse and its attempts to throw him off.

They're not exactly subtle on this first draft of the plan. They have Victor/Lubov send him astray, and when the Caroline photo draws him right back in, they try to use Echo for the same project. When that fails, she tries to kill him, twice. Meanwhile, Topher is worried about the actives already, especially Echo. Apparently she's already developing somehow, and he has several talks about the issue with Boyd, and an awkward confrontation with Dr. Saunders.

DeWitt and Mr. Dominic, however, are notable mostly by their near total absence. DeWitt seems in control when dealing with the client and serving up spoonfuls of exposition near the opening of the show, but when we see her later she's being yelled at by her superiors over the phone (re: Ballard) or ordering his failed killing. She's less of a mighty and mysterious ice queen here.

In fact, while DeWitt is one of the major ensemble cast members by the latter part of the first season, in this pilot I'd have to say there are two protagonists: Ballard and Topher. Yeah, Topher. He gets a lot of screen time, and he's actively moving a chunk of plot forward. Echo/Caroline, on the other hand, feels sidelined.

A lot of things feel rushed, including the Doll/handler relationship, the imprinting process itself, and the question about where they get their "volunteers."

After watching Echo, my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful, said that Ghost, the in-continuity pilot, was better structured. In many ways, I have to agree. There was more show and less tell, we saw the original Caroline before she was wiped, and we saw Alpha rather than simply hearing him mentioned. Of course, Ghost is saddled with a boring procedural kidnapping plot weighing it down.

I'm going to say that Echo is not a great pilot, not in the way that Serenity was for Firefly for example. It's flawed in more interesting ways than Ghost, however.

Ghost gives viewers a straightforward explanation of the show's central idea, and introduces the characters and their traits fairly well. Echo is all over the place. It's like an excited puppy, fun and cute and really packed with energy, but scattered. It feels like Joss Whedon had been sitting on his cool ideas for so long he couldn't not let them out all at once. Fly, my monkeys, fly! He takes the show almost to the place it was at the end of the first season in less than sixty minutes, but the ride is a little rough.

So I'm going to say something weird here: I understand why Fox ordered a second pilot. This pilot would have snagged me, but it is weird and frenetic and talky. Ghost is not a better pilot, but it's a much more conventional one. It has the kind of flaws that networks seem to think make for good TV. Echo has the kind of flaws that might signal greatness if the writer can rein him or herself in.

And having seen Whedon's other work, and the latter half of the season, I'd say greatness is still possible.

Oh, season two, where are you when I need you?

"I hope we find me alive"

2009-07-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

Warning: for the purists out there who have not yet put their money down for the Dollhouse DVD set, this contains spoilers for the final episode, Epitaph One. Reading any further will sour your enjoyment not only of the episode, but of life itself. Food will be as ashes in your mouth, and your lamentations will drive nearby squirrels to commit seppuku.

Okay, the lightweights are gone? Good.

Like everyone else, I heard the basic plot outline of Epitaph One months ago: Felicia Day (Mag) and an intrepid band of survivors whose names I never quite picked up, are trying to survive in the far-off future of 2019 after Dollhouse technology has made everything go kerblooey.

The basic plot is this: the survivors stumble into the Dollhouse while taking a shortcut through the sewers, trying to avoid the signals that can turn you into a ~~reaver~~ killer angry person. Realizing it is the origin point for "the tech" that's driven the world into its current zombie apocalypse/rise of the machines state, they use a mindwiped refugee they're dragging around as a template for a series of memories they find programmed into the chair. So we get a series of sequential flashbacks, showing events both before the first episodes of Dollhouse, and later, possibly up to just a year or two before 2019. Meanwhile, someone is killing off the survivors one by one, and a spooky, Dollish Whiskey, sans facial scars, shows up to offer them some help.

This is another Dollhouse episode that feels far, far longer than its actual running time (in a good way). There's a lot going on here, and each flashback is crammed with both exposition and character development. In general, it's extremely well done, and if it were just a vehicle for a "Days of Future Past" style storyline, it would get an A+ just on that score. But the main plot thread isn't bad either, even if it does revolve around the "and then there were none" contrivance of having the survivors killed off one by one. This is another way the show is good: who is killing the characters should be an obvious twist, but I didn't have even five minutes when the show slowed down to let me actually try to puzzle it out.

So this brings the number of really good Dollhouse episodes up to seven, meaning the first season was more than 50 per cent awesome after all! Hooray!

Up next, a review of the original pilot, and some of the special features.

Underworld: Why did I rent this movie?

2009-07-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Well, mostly because I thought there must be a Rifftrack for it. Sadly, there is not. I had to make up my own jokes, and after a while mocking the ridiculous gothy/bondage outfits of the vampires, the endless blue-black darkness of every shot, and the repeated script failures grew difficult. At two hours long, Underworld is a movie that will make you believe in immortality, because it seems to go on for three or four hundred years.

This is a movie about vampires in which we never see them feeding. It's a movie about werewolves in which we never see them mauling innocent townsfolk. We're told about both of these things, but considering how much money they spent on a half dozen FX-laden battles, you'd think they could have fit that in.

This is a film in which the most important distinction is between vampires and werewolves, and yet they're almost impossible to tell apart. It's all long sweeping dark coloured coats. You can tell the costumer took a shot at making them distinct, only to have the directed call for more darkness, more rain, more shadows, making it a moot issue.

This is a film in which characters have only two modes: lack of affect and snarling scenery chewing.

This is a movie in which werewolves claw their way along walls and ceilings, rather than running faster on the floors. Even though Spider-Manning their way through the world means they are easier to shoot.

This is a movie in which six hundred-year-old vampires get up and say, "Hmmmm... what to wear... leather fetish gear again? Uncomfortable corset? Something with a stiff, high collar? Maybe something that seems both highly weird looking and is impractical if I'm attacked by giant hairy monsters." Nobody wears jammies and bunny slippers.

This is a movie in which the action seems to continue for three or four days, but it is never daylight.

This is a film which Bill Nighy cannot save. No Bill, you tried, but nobody can spit out that dialogue and not look like a total headcase.

But what does it all mean?

2009-07-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Thomas Harlan's House of Reeds is in no way a bad book. But it is not a book that made me want to jump up and down in glee, either.

House of Reeds is apparently the sequel to Wasteland of Flint, and the story of its protagonists will continue in Land of the Dead (which, according to Wikipedia, is out next month). I haven't read Wasteland of Flint, because my library doesn't have it, and neither do my local used book stores. With that disclaimer out of the way, on to the meat of the book.

Harlan is a good goddamn worldbuilder. He's apparently written a whole whack of alternate history/fantasy epics for Tor, as well as working as a game designer, and it shows. In this series, he's merged alternate history with space opera and military SF, creating a weirdass background that sucked me right in. The basic story is this: sometime around the 1500s, the Aztecs conquered the world. They could do this because a few hundred years earlier, a big fleet of Japanese refugees, fleeing the Mongol invasion of Japan, washed up on the shores of North America. So Aztecs got to learn all about things like steel and horses and gunpowder, and then they went and beat the crap out of most of Europe. Take that, Columbus! Flashforward a few hundred years, and the joint Aztec-Nipponese space navy is still kicking ass and taking names. Our heroes are all either members of the Aztec-Nipponese empire, or they're on its fringes trying to survive.

The story takes place almost entirely on the planet Jagan, where the Aztec secret police/priesthood is planning to deliberately incite a small brushfire war, a flowery war. They want to throw one of the younger sons of the Aztec emperor into the mess. He's a drunken idiot, so he'll either man up and cover himself in glory, or die and please the gods that way. His Scottish bodyguards will have to try and make sure it's the former. Meanwhile, Gretchen Anderssen, the xenoarcheologist and hero of the first book, has been ordered to Jagen to study a possible ancient and powerful artifact, and Captain Mitsuhara Hadeishi of the Imperial Navy has just come into orbit after a long patrol, looking to resupply and refit his battered ship.

The elements of a great epic story are there, but Harlan never quite makes them gel. Characters are defined well to start with, but we don't get below the surface of most, probably because there are so many conflicting plot threads – there are at least four viewpoint characters that I can recall just from Hadeishi's ship. Then there are Anderssen and her team, the bodyguards, the wicked old spy pulling everyone else's strings, diplomats, the various alien locals, and so on.

A word on those aliens: Harlan can't do original alien critters. We get a cat-alien, a whole bunch of lizard aliens, and a brief cameo by bug aliens and a super shapeshifer alien. They all fall into categories such as fierce predator, wise old mystic, or barbarian warrior. The fact that they come off like the clichés of how other races were portrayed in Victorian fiction isn't a good thing.

Just when it seems things are settling down in the plot, Harlan suddenly pulls out the big guns, ignites the war, and turns the last third into one long chase scene/gun battle. It's not that I don't like action sequences, but these go on and on and on. They're also disturbingly colonial. Almost every fight involves small numbers of well armed humans holding off hordes of less-well-armed local lizard people. It's like Rorke's Drift, one of the battles of the Sepoy Revolt. Or maybe I'm going too far back, and it's just a Black Hawk Down homage. Harlan lovingly describes how the massively overpowered weapons of the humans chew up hundreds of lizard guys at a time.

The plot about the alien device of great power also never comes together. I'm not actually sure what it did, in fact. I think it did something, and there was some attempt to explain exactly what near the end of the book, but it seemed sort of inconsequential by then. Another key plot, a thread involving a hidden alien and the prince's bodyguards, seemed to be deliberately leading into the next book in the series, and was left dangling.

For fans of well-written military SF or space opera, I'd say give it a try, especially if you can find the first book in the series for background. But it just never quite came together for me.

Things I learned from 300

2009-06-17T08:04:00.001-07:00

Coming late to this party, but I finally watched Zack Snyder's/Frank Miller's 300 on the weekend, and boy, did it stink.

Not to rain on the parade of thousands of fanboys who claim to enjoy it ironically, but that was one of the worst movies I've seen in years. And I watched The Rocker the same weekend. It also makes the achievement of Watchmen even more amazing; Watchmen isn't great but it's far from bad, and where it modifies the original story it usually does so carefully and in a not-moronic way.

Not 300. I felt like every addition to the Frank Miller comic went in the wrong direction. You have a comic that's already ludicrously stylized? Let's make the film adaptation even more stylized! There's basically no female roles in the comic? We'll put one in the move, so she can be raped! Some of the dialogue sounded cheesy and lame the first time around? A big spoonful of that please!

Seriously, 300 is one of those milestones in Frank Miller's career, the kind labeled "25 miles to Suckville." The guy's been going slowly insane for decades, and 300 was written at the point where he was just starting to move away from his Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns projects and beginning to walk the road that would take him to "I'm the goddamn Batman!" So it sort of works, but it's also loaded with the kind of stuff that would mark Miller for the rest of his career: enough testosterone to make a rhino explode, a style that is so extreme it constantly calls attention to itself, loads of blood, the valorization of violence, a lack of good characterization, and a big ol' Girls Not Allowed sign on the front door.

Politically, the movie was painful. I think calling it fascist is a little unfair. Even fascism, as a political philosophy, is more nuanced than 300. The movie was more a blend of unthinking nationalism wrapped up in some default American values. (Freedom be good!) Of course, those values are left undefined and unexamined, so we never question why the people fighting for freedom have a king, for example. Who orders them to cheerfully murder wounded soldiers while he eats an apple. Ha ha! It's funny because in any other movie that's how you'd be able to tell who the bad guy was!

Now, things I learned from watching 300:

• The ancient Persians were mostly African-American or east Asian in origin.

• "Phalanx" means everybody runs around slicing up people in slow-mo.

• Athenians were gay. Not the Spartans.

• The Persian army included the Uruk Hai and Sloth from The Goonies.

• In a related note, you can put ninjas in anything!

• Ancient Greek oracles were really just nude interpretative dancers.

• When going on a long mission, all you need to carry as a Spartan warrior are you weapons, shield, and red cloak. Food is not necessary, probably because you'll just murder and eat anyone you run across.

• Physically disabled people are inherently evil.

• Breastplates are for sissies.

• But not shaving your chest. A smooth, hairless torso, much like a Ken doll's, is super-manly.

• Gerard Butler has huge fucking teeth!

• Peasants don't really exist. Probably because if they ever showed up, the movie might have had to talk about how the Spartans ritually declared war on their peasants yearly, and murdered the troublesome ones as an initiation ritual for young men.

The seas are red because they're full of blood, get it?

2009-06-08T13:48:00.001-07:00

Scott Lynch's follow up to The Lies of Locke Lamora is the almost as good Red Seas Under Red Skies. Two of the protagonists from The L of LL are back, Lamora himself and his good buddy Jean Tannen. They've relocated to a new city, two years after the bloody denoument of the last book, and are working a long, long con.

The first half of the book is split between the con itself – they're trying some complicated theft/swindle targeting the richest and most dangerous casino owner and gangster in town – and the back story of how they got there. At the end of Locke Lamora, the title character was half dead and Jean wasn't in much better shape. Lynch shows Lamora diving into a big pool of self pity, with Jean forced to repeatedly fish him out. Lamora puts himself back together slowly (in the movie version, there'll be a montage of him re-learning card tricks) until he's ready to take on the big con.

Just as the con gets going, however, it's derailed. The military dictator of their new home town decides to press the two Gentlemen Bastards into service. He's on the verge of a civil war with the town's wealthy merchants. He wants a fake pirate scare, so he has Locke and Jean given a crash course in seamanship and sent out with a crew. They'll ravage the annoying merchants and give the dictator the excuse to make his army and navy even bigger.

Then there are mutinies, battles at sea, numerous assassination attempts, new love, betrayal, more sea battles, more betrayal, and Jean and Locke are squeezed tight between so many clashing factions they're almost squished. The book concludes with an orgy of finales – to the con, the pirate wars, and the fates of half a dozen characters.

On a page to page level, the book is almost as good as LoLL. Locke and Jean are still compelling characters, and the pirates, casino owners, various henchmen and others are colourfully drawn. The new city – I still can't remember the damn place's name – just isn't as lively or as fully realized as Camorr, however. The pirate ships prove a better setting.

My key complaints with the book are twofold. First, the flashback structure doesn't work as well here as it did in The Lies of Locke Lamora. In that book, we were learning about the education and allegiances of the Gentlemen Bastards as we watched them doing their job in the present day. In Red Seas, an enormous amount of time is spent in the first few flashbacks on Locke being miserable, but we already know he gets over this in time to jump into the big con game. It all feels too drawn out, and it hurts the book's forward momentum. Second, the grumbling and personality conflicts between Locke and Jean feel a bit contrived. They seem to constantly be offending, disappointing or annoying one another. It never amounts to anything, though. There just isn't enough conflict to tear the duo apart.

Oh, and yet again the love of Locke's life is referred to, but does not appear. Two books running is a bit much to drag out such a key plot point.

Still, it's very deserving of the label swashbuckling. Fun characters, a fun world, and a fun adventure. If you liked the first book, by all means read it and move on to this one.

Video games vs. story

2009-05-27T18:05:00.000-07:00

I finally went and did it. I dropped a few hundred dollars on the weekend to upgrade to the current generation of gaming consoles. (PS3 if you're wondering.)

Already, I'm a complete convert to the Portal Worship Cult. Funny, brain-teasing, creative, simple in an elegant and clean-lined way, it's also set me to thinking about storytelling in videogames.

I'm not what you'd call a hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination. But when I do buy games, I tend to avoid any game that has a story element. I mostly stick to straight up shooters that allow me to blow stuff up real good, or to weird puzzle challenge games, like Katamari Damacy. I've tried to play other types of games, like JRPGs and the more narratively dense shooters. Usually, I'm disappointed. The story elements feel like intrusions into the gameplay at the best of times.

For example, I played a lot of Killzone on my old PS2. Killzone was supposed to be this great Halo killer when it was in development. What actually came out was, for its time, a pretty solid but not spectacular shooter. I played through it a couple of times, but every time I was groaning when the cutscenes come up.

The game starts out in such a promising way: Brian Cox, playing the Hitlerish leader of the bad mutant humans, exhorting his troops with cries for revenge, while a montage displaying the brutal thuggery of his reign unfolds. It's actually pretty good. Unfortunately, that's the last you'll be seeing of Mr. Cox. I can imagine him coming into the studio, flipping through the script, rattling off his lines in his best Early Hannibal Lecter voice. The guy in the studio gives him the thumbs up, he gets his cheque and he's off to his next gig. See ya later, quality.

Every other cut scene is a babble of military and action movie cliches, with some ethnic stereotyping thrown in. The four main characters, all of whom supposedly live on a colony world somewhere light years from Earth, are from USAmerican central casting. There's the square-jawed, square-headed white male central hero, the female assassin, the Hispanic tough, profane, heavy weapons guy, and the half-mutant spy. Both he and the woman have British accents, because they're smart, right? The characters swear and bitch and have minor conflicts, none of which make a damn bit of difference to the gameplay, which is of the highly linear "Go to A and kill everybody there" variety.

Compare this to Portal. No cut scenes. No other characters, really, if you discount the Weighted Companion Cube and GlaDOS. Just this acerbic running commentary from a crazed computer, and the little-girl voices of the killer robots. But there is a story. It's hidden, literally, in the cracks of the game. Aside from GlaDOS's darkly funny instructions and misinformation, there are little hidden rooms in the game. As you go through the tasks, you find hints left behind by a previous test subject. He's apparently spent time living in the walls to avoid going through some of the more dangerous rooms. In some places he's scrawled things on the walls. It's dark and atmospheric, enhanced by the soundtrack.

Now I'm almost finished the story. Will there be resolution to this bit of story? I don't care. Portal has dropped me into a world and is giving me enough information to make myself the central character. They aren't forcing bad versions of movie dialogue down my throat. If I want plot and character in depth, I don't reach for a video game, I find a book or a movie or a TV show. Video games aren't good at depth. They're good at atmosphere and setting, and immersion.

Portal gets the way to storytell in a video game is to get out of the way.

Locke Lamora is stealing your wallet right now

2009-05-22T07:39:00.001-07:00

I'm a little late to this party, but I finally got around to reading The Lies of Locke Lamora over the last few days. And by "reading" I mean "absorbing as fast as my eyes would allow." This is one of those books that, if you like it, you will stay up until 3 a.m. reading the damn thing, just to find out what happens next. And you'll stay up until 4 a.m. to find out what happens after that, sleep and an early workday be damned.

The title character is a street urchin when we meet him, with a gift for thieving and deceit. He's so good at it, in fact, that he's being sold by his current owner/unsuitable parental substitute, the Thiefmaker, to a crooked priest. While the Thiefmaker runs a sort of wholesale Fagin-style operation in training orphans for crime, the priest, Father Chains, is running a boutique business. He needs clever apprentices who can be trained for the long con.

The story follows Locke through intercut scenes, part in the present as he and his band of thieves try to gull a rich nobleman and avoid a brutal gang war, and part in the past as we see how he and the gang grew up and trained together.

All the characters are vivid, particularly Father Chains, a priest of "the thirteenth god," the god of thieves and swindlers. There's also Jean Tannen, Locke's portly best friend who happens to be lethal with a pair of hatchets, the card sharking Sanza twins, and Bug the adolescent apprentice of the gang. Their gang moves through the city of Camorr, a Venice-like creation peopled by nobles, gang leaders, thugs, merchants, assassins, shark-fighters, priests, and guards. Camorr itself is one of the most memorable characters, with its numerous islands and canals, and its mysterious glass-like structures left by a vanished elder race. (I'd say it has about 700 milli-Crobuzons.)

Locke's character, or lack thereof, is at the centre of the story. He's physically a little short and slight, with a forgettable face, no particular skill with weapons or hand to hand combat, no magical ability, and no noble title or destiny handed down by the gods. He's just too clever for his own good, and very skilled at deception and fast talking. Part of the time, he reminded me of a trickster figure like Loki or Coyote, morally ambiguous and talking his way in and out of ever problem he encounters. In modern speculative fiction, Locke most closely resembles Miles Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. It's refreshing to see characters in genres (fantasy and military SF, respectively) who usually rely on brawn and machismo using their brains and mental toughness, instead. (And if you liked Locke Lamora and you haven't read any Vorkosigan books, boy, are you in for a treat. Get yourself to the library right now. You'll thank me for this.)

Are there problems with the book? Yes, of course. There's the love of Locke's life, who is mentioned frequently but doesn't even get a cameo in one of the flashbacks, which makes the book feel less than whole. If you like moral characters, you may be troubled by Locke's utter lack of most ethics; his primary motivations are loyalty, revenge, and a need to outsmart people. There are also moments that stretch believeability thin, even in a novel like this; a sequence in which Locke tries to infiltrate the same building three times in three different disguises in one day comes to mind.

Still, those are minor problems compared to the book's primary virtue: it is fun. This book is swashbuckling, an updated successor to the novels of Sabatini or The Princess Bride. Looking back over the past half dozen SF and fantasy novels I've read, the number that is just fun is sadly small. Books that inspire a grin should be treasured.

I long for the quiet dignity of William Shatner: A Star Trek movie review

2009-05-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

I didn't like original Trek when I was a kid. I was born in '78, which means that by age 10 I'd seen all three original Star Wars movies. By age 11, thanks to my ~~neighbourhood pushers~~ local librarians I'd read Heinlein, some Asimov and Clarke, and dozens of more forgettable names. Compared to what George Lucas could do, and especially compared to the images authors were pumping into my head, Star Trek looked slow, cheap, and lame. (Even 10-year-old Ouranosaurus thought miniskirts on female crewmembers was stupid.) I didn't get into the franchise at all until TNG came along, with better special effects and a captain who didn't chase women in beehive hairdos.

But I saw a fair bit of original Trek, regardless. It was on in endless reruns on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, or in the summers when there was nothing else to watch. And it was nominally SF. So I caught an episode here and an episode there. I learned about flat-foreheaded Klingons, energy beings, pon farr, styrofoam rocks, evil computers the size of Buicks, and "show me this Earth thing called 'kissing.'"

Now that I'm older and (theoretically) less easily distracted by shiny objects and big explosions, I've come to appreciate that there was often solid storytelling behind original Trek. In preparation for seeing the movie on the weekend, I've collected the whole series from my local ~~pushers~~ library and I've been watching season one.

Holy crap, is that a contrast to the original movie.

I know the movies are another animal compared to the TV show, but the more episodes I watch the deeper the gulf seems. The film is all about proving there's no such thing as a no-win scenario. It starts with Kirk cheating his way through the Kobayashi Maru test. It ends with him recapitulating the events that led to the death of his father – except that he saves the captain and the ship and Earth and all the important cast members and gets a promotion and a medal. He never learns a damn thing about loss. He never faces loss.

Compare that to original Trek. I just watched "Space Seed," the famous Khan Noonien Singh episode. It has some egregious bits of 1960s stuck in there, especially the sexist plot about the female crewmember who falls so hard for Khan she'll help him take over the ship after 20 minutes in his presence.

But – there's a scene in which Khan has seized control. He needs the crew to help him steal the Enterprise. He locks Kirk in a decompression chamber and starts pumping out the air while the senior crew watches. If one of you will join me, Khan says, I'll let him live. They all sit there, impassive. Khan points out that he'll throw them in there one by one until someone cracks. Still they sit there. They're prepared to let the captain die, and then die themselves, because helping Khan is against everything they stand for.

That keeps coming up again and again in the original series. Characters stand for things. They stand for them because they think they're right. Spock opposes killing hostile aliens in "The Galileo Seven," for moral reasons. Kirk wants proof that an actor really is a genocidal dictator in "The Conscience of the King," he won't just go in guns blazing. Characters argue about logic, reason and ethics.

Can you imagine the film's Kirk and Spock having a discussion about ethics not conducted at full volume, ending with a fistfight?

Every action by Spock and Kirk in the film is undertaken for personal reasons. Neither joins Starfleet because they believe in its mission. And saving the Earth? Well, I think we're pretty much all in favour of that.

I've said this before, but people do sometimes act based on ethics and ideology they've arrived at on their own. That's why original Trek, for all its cheese, is growing on me. It's why I'm tired of the modern trend of having every character action be motivated by nothing but selfish, petty, personal concerns. I don't care of Kirk gets over the death of his father. I care that he has some goddamn ideals.

As a couple of hours light entertainment, the movie is fine. There are shiny objects and big explosions, and the folks playing Spock and McCoy and Uhuru did a good job. Simon Pegg was hilarious as Scotty, and in a film so inconsequential, he could have been introduced earlier. But really, you'd get more storytelling out of two or three hours spent watching Shatner and Nimoy dodge styrofoam rocks.

Summer reading for Dollhouse fans

2009-05-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhhhhh... Dollhouse has been renewed. I admit, I didn't think it would happen, while my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) always kept the faith. It'll be nice to see some more episodes, hopefully of the interesting variety, and not of the "Echo has an assignment as X" style.

But what to do for the next five or six months before we get another fix of Dollhouse? We go to the library and the video store, of course. For my fellow Dollhouse fans, a selection of stories that cover the same themes: body swapping, identity, reality when the mind is a commodity.

• Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. I've already mentioned this one, but both this book and its sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, explore the possibility of wholesale body swapping and immortality through cloning and downloading. It's dark, grim, noirish post-cyberpunk with lots of sex and violence. The politics become more explicit with the follow up books, but they never take over the story.

• The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, and Last Call, by Tim Powers. Again, body swapping and dark quests for immortality, but in Powers case using magic. The best of the bunch is probably The Anubis Gates, although my favourite will always be On Stranger Tides for its sword fightin', piratical ways. Far, far superior to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

• Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas. A year before The Matrix came out and everyone started talking about bullet time, there was a much quieter, much better film that covered the same territory and then some. Dark City is about a man who wakes up next to a murdered woman, seemingly her killer. But he can't remember anything. He flees through a shifting city that never sees dawn, and in which people are swapped from home to home and role to role much like... dolls in a dollhouse? With its synthetic personalities, it's the closest analogue to Dollhouse you can find. Plus, a chance to see Keifer Sutherland before he got all annoying as a torture-monkey on 24.

• Diaspora, by Greg Egan. This staggeringly brain-twisting novel concerns both AI and uploaded personalities. In similarly-themed short stories, Egan has also explored creating multiple copies of oneself, in some cases to undertake suicidal scientific research, such as travelling into a black hole.

• The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A mad scientist kidnaps children in order to harvest their dreams and save him from his nightmares. A steampunk setting with clones, blind radar-enabled cultists, and Ron Perlman with a bizarre hairstyle, speaking French.

Lend a hand, get a gift

2009-05-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again. No, not the time when all my favourite SF shows are cancelled. I think that's tommorow. No, it's Relay for Life time. So you're going to have to indulge me in a little public service announcement that has (almost) nothing to do with science fiction and nerdism.

This will be the third year I'm participating in the Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life. It's a twelve hour event, in which teams take turns walking around a track. No big deal, really, but the money we raise goes towards cancer research, prevention, and support for cancer patients and their families. This year's Relay in my hometown is on May 22, so there's a little more than a week left.

I'm going to pester my friends and family for pledges, but I like unusual fundraisers too. Last year I raised money by promising to have my legs waxed if I got $500, and I got more than $1,000. It was well worth three months of not being able to wear shorts in the scorching heat.

This year, my legs are still too tender (and some of our local politicians have offered the same thing, for $10,000). So I thought I'd turn to the Interwebs instead.

Here's where the science fiction comes back into the picture. If you donate to my cause, you can make me do tricks. It's like throwing peanuts at monkeys in the zoo. Only less cruel. And there are multiple prizes for different donation levels!

Here's my list:

• $10 donation: I'll write and post five haiku about dinosaurs, zombies, pirates, ninjas, or any combination of the above.

• $25 donation: I'll write and post a flash fiction story on the SF topic of the donor's choice and post it on the blog. (Limit one per customer.) I used to be pretty good at writing SF.

• $30 donation: I'll write you into the novel I'm working on. You can get eaten by a dinosaur in print! Well, someday it'll be in print...

• $50 donation (plus shipping): I'll create and send you a tee shirt with my Rudy the Undead Hound logo on it. Who wouldn't want their chest emblazoned with an obscure geek reference to a non-existent 1980s cartoon show! I'm never going to sell these or make any more after this month because I'm pretty sure any intellectual property rights reside with Wil Wheaton and/or the Dungeons & Dragons folks. Limit ten, so order now!

• $100 donation: I'll dance like a monkey, while wearing a gorilla mask, and post the results to YouTube.

• $500 donation: I'll wax my legs again, damn you! And send you pictures. You sick bastard.

• $1,000 donation: I'll do 100 push ups in a row. If I throw up, I have to try again.

• $2,500 donation: I'll write and publish online, and under my own name, a 40,000 word fanfic in which you team up with Harry Potter to save the world from the cyborg Nazi Yetis of Ultima Thule.

• $5,000 donation: I'll walk over hot coals, and send you the video. And possibly the medical reports.

To donate, click this link. Select the option in which your chosen name and donation scrolls in the donors box. Then email me at ouranosaurus at hotmail.com with the details of your donation and any other information I'll need.

This is one of the most important things I do all year. It would be great if you could help out.

I love you, John Bellairs

2009-05-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about having a mother who works in a school library is getting discards, the books that are too old or grubby or beat up to keep in circulation anymore. This was obviously really cool when I was a bookwormish nine-year-old, but even as a bookfanaticish 30-year-old it's pretty neat.

So this Mother's Day, after doing some mildly backbreaking yard work to thank Mom for bringing me into the world, she gave me a sack of books. Well, most of them are intended for my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful and will be a teacher soon. But I'm calling dibs on the two John Bellairs books.

Back in the 1990s, there was this big craze for horror novels for kids. R.L. Stine novels in particular. Well, I spit on your R.L. Stine novels, do you hear me! They cannot hold a candle to the fiendish works of Mr. Bellairs!

Do your Stine novels have covers by Edward Gorey? I think not! Do they build their horror slowly, using realistic settings and character development? Do they weave a tapestry of horror from commonplace items – a ring made from a bent nail, a cheap Egyptian-style souvenier? Do they leave the reader certain something is wrong but not entirely sure what? I think not!

Mostly, I've read the Johnny Dixon novels, so I'm eagerly re-reading The Curse of the Blue Figurine for the first time since I was about 12 years old. I'm struck by some of the details – the intensely Catholic background of the main characters, the blunt attitude toward death and injury – that I didn't recall. I did recall that Johnny was a fairly nerdy, bright kid with glasses. I have no idea why he appealed to me as a young reader. None whatsoever. There's also the crotchety and eccentric professor, who frankly puts Dumbledore to shame as a weird old mentor figure.

I've also got a copy of The Dark Secret of Weatherend, which stars Anthony Monday. I don't think I've ever read any of the Anthony Monday books so this will be an interesting little treat.

About a year ago, I re-read what must be the most terrifying of Bellairs books. It's a Johnny Dixon book, and the premise is both bizarre and unforgettable. A realistic baseball-playing automaton has been created by a mad scientist. But it only works if human eyes are inserted in its head. Go. Go now and find a copy of The Eyes of the Killer Robot. It's high octane nightmare fuel for 10 year olds.

"I know who I am."

2009-05-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

It seems like the consensus around Omega, the penultimate-but-last-to-air episode of Dollhouse, is that it wasn't quite as good as last week's stellar outing. I'd agree, but I'd like to see the parts of this episode that were left on the cutting room floor before making a final decision.

Spoilers ahoy.

From last week's cliffhanger, everyone's running around like chickens with their minds wiped. It only takes DeWitt, Boyd, Ballard, Topher and Whiskey/Saunders to put together Alpha's whole scheme, but by then Echo's gone, and all the data wedges containing her previous imprints, including her original Caroline persona.

The plot threads play out, with flashbacks showing how Alpha changed from being just another doll to letting threads of his original personality slip through – something we've seen all season with Echo, and even with Victor.

Boyd and Ballard wind up teaming up, buddy-cop style, to hunt down Alpha. Dr. Saunders finds proof that she's a doll, and we see that her face was carved up even before Alpha went totally batshit. (About five minutes before, but still.)

Alpha pours more than 30 personalities into Echo's mind using his homebrew imprinting chair, and she promptly (and not particularly surprisingly) beans him in the head with a pipe. Alpha, it turns out, was a psycho on his way to serial killer status before he ever became a doll, while we know that Echo/Caroline has deep reserves of empathy and personal strength. She tries to save the hapless waitress Alpha's kidnapped and loaded up with Caroline's mind. She fails, but between her efforts and those of Ballard, she does save her original Caroline wedge. Alpha scampers like a bunny.

Of course, there was also that plot thread in which November and Sierra were made into badass bounty hunters to help chase down Alpha, too. And they just... what? Went for coffee instead? We never see them after they're imprinted.

That's the main problem with this episode. There's at least five minutes, maybe more, that didn't make it onto the screen, and I think that contributes to the anticlimactic nature of the ending. There's no final throwdown with Alpha; he simply disappears after dropping the Caroline wedge. I suspect the edits are also partly responsible for the suddenness with which Ballard finds himself working at the Dollhouse as a contractor to track down Alpha. His turnabout on Mellie/November doesn't seem warranted based on what we saw.

Criticism aside (please, please, Fox, release an extended version of this on the DVDs!) there's a lot to like about this episode. Among other things, we see three different reactions to a doll realizing its true nature. Alpha becomes an egomaniac. Echo just feels empty, despite having so many personalities to choose from, and rejects the artifice of her personas. Whiskey/Saunders reacts partly with despair, and partly with a strange acceptance. I think that last is the most interesting. Saunders as Saunders knows that the dolls are often fleeing something horrible. She must know that she is there for some similar reason. Does she think that being Saunders, a good person and a healer, is preferable to the alternatives? Or is she just broken down?

Plenty of fodder for the next season. Now let's just hope we get there.

ETA: It's just before midnight Pacific time, and the Dollhouse DVD is number 18 and climbing on Amazon's bestsellers list. Not too shabby. A few tens of thousands of sales might be the only thing now to convince Fox not the axe the show.

Killing the Hollywood orcs

2009-05-04T07:38:00.001-07:00

Most of the Internet, at least the nerdishly-inclined parts, have now probably seen The Hunt For Gollum, the 40 minute fan film created by a pack of crazed Brits. And boy, was I surprised as I watched the trailer and the film itself.

Yeah, it's pretty good, especially for something that apparently cost just 3,000 pounds, or about $4,400 US. You couldn't do the catering for a movie in Hollywood for that little. But, as a fan film, no one drew a salary and the producers begged, borrowed and stole before they shelled out money. That's just standard.

What's not standard is the overall quality. It's only a degree less professional looking than Peter Jackson's films. The orcs look like orcs, not like guys with Halloween masks. The Rangers are wearing realistic weapons and gear. The beautiful scenery is lovingly filmed. There are aerial shots of snow-capped peaks which they got from... where? Who cares? It looks damn good.

The plot is drawn from the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, and it's briefly referenced within the films itself. Gandalf warns Aragorn that there's this nasty little post-Hobbit thing called Gollum and that it's making its way towards the Shire, searching for its lost ring. Meanwhile, Sauron's troops are massing and may be looking for Gollum. Gollum can't be captured by the orcs, or the enemy will know where to find the ring.

Aragorn heads out and tracks Gollum, first by rumour, then by luring him into a trap. Gollum spends most of the rest of the film in a burlap sack, because no matter how well funded the film is, you just can't motion capture Andy Serkis for 30 minutes. That's going to blow your budget.

The remainder of the film is orcs hunting Aragorn while Gollum tries to escape. There are several moments of real tension, the acting is creditable, and the director clearly knows more than which way to point the cameras. And there's a massive fight scene in which Aragorn takes on a patrol of about a dozen orcs and kills them all.

The fight scene needs a little more attention. I'm actually going to argue that the fight scene in The Hunt for Gollum is slightly better than most of the fight scenes in the actual LotR films.

Whoa, whoa, hold up! It's not about the skills of stuntmen or the ability of the fight coordinators. It's about directorial choices. With a few cool exceptions, Peter Jackson belongs to the quick cuts school of fight direction. You will occasionally see a cool moment, like Legolas stabbing an orc with an arrow, then shooting it into the next orc, or Aragorn jamming a torch into a Ring Wraith's face. But more often, you get a bunch of guys running at each other and then there's some sword swinging, some quick cuts, sound effects and screams, and an orc keels over. You don't see move-countermove very often. The Hunt for Gollum has just one big fight scene, and it has several cool fight combos packed in, including the skewering of two orcs, and the final boss fight with the patrol leader. It's a good fight scene for any movie, let alone a fan film!

It's only in one way that The Hunt for Gollum disappoints, and that's in the way it falls into the fanfic trap. This part of the tale, Aragorn's search for Gollum, really isn't necessary. It's filling in a blank spot in the story that could have been left blank. We already know how everyone's story here ends. I'd frankly rather have seen a story from another chunk of Middle Earth's history, maybe with original characters. Still, it made my geeky heart glad, and I was quite happy to let it entertain me for 40 minutes.

On the other hand, this film should have Hollywood quaking just as much as the Pirate Bay does. The entertainment industry's been so focused on cracking down on illegal downloading that they haven't bothered to look at the other side of the equation: what happens when anyone with a dream, a couple of credit cards and a gaggle of willing volunteers can make something that looks this damn good?

In the past, Hollywood wasn't threatened by people who made legendarily cheap films. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, but his goal was to become a professional film maker. So Hollywood could deal with him. He wanted to join the club.

What do you do with people who have no interest in joining the club? I'm sure some of the folks in The Hunt for Gollum want to move on to "real" acting, makeup, or stunt work, and probably some of them already are in the field. But a lot of them just did it because they love LotR. There are fan film communities for every big cult property out there, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And time I spend watching fan films is time I spend not watching professionally made, for profit stuff. Eyeballs equals money.

Hollywood keeps telling us they're struggling to make money because of piracy (and we're not far from the point where every shack in the Sahel can download and watch Wolverine and Transformers 2). Meanwhile there are gangs of film makers who learned their trade as unpaid volunteers and do it for the love of making a movie. If the quality of amateur film rises while the financial rationale for professional film plunges, it could really upend the entire Hollywood system. I doubt that we'll ever see a day when nobody makes money off of films. But we could be close to a day when fewer people make a lot less money, even as we get a lot more movies available to us, the fans.

The next 10 years are going to be really interesting.

"My prince"

2009-05-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Briar Rose, last night's episode of Dollhouse, could best be described as kick ass. But before we go any further...

SPOILERS!

Oh, sorry I shouted there. No, don't worry. I'm just excited because it turns out that freakin' Wash is Alpha!

Yeah, I did not see that happening. I watched the ep with three others, and our surprised gasps at the reveal would have sent a barometer spinning. We knew Alan Tudyk was in the episode, from the trailers. We knew that Alpha was in the episode. Did we put those two things together? No. Because he's Wash! He plays with dinosaurs and gets speared! He doesn't slice people up and kick ass!

Well played, Ms. Espenson and Mr. Whedon. Well played.

Aside from that, it was also a taut and well-written episode on just about every level. The bit where Echo is trying to help the sexually abused kid, which could have been cringe-inducing in so many ways, turned out to be well written and well acted. It dealt with its awful subject matter head on and without histrionics – the moment where Echo talks about how she would plan escapes and then give up was very well done. It also introduced the Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty theme, which would have its own twist at the end of the hour.

We got to delve deeper into the creepy and messed up psyche of Agent Ballard as well, when he refuses to rescue November/Mellie. Why? It's not really been spelled out well, but I'm thinking he doesn't consider Mellie a real person, and he's been too personally hurt by that. He's built a tower in his mind, and at the top there's a real princess named Caroline.

But that gets at one of the central questions Dollhouse asks. Mellie is undoubtedly a synthetic person, programmed to love Ballard. But what she feels is plainly no less real to her. That's the crux of it; Ballard doesn't think Mellie is real, so she doesn't count. Caroline does. I don't think he's right. The Dollhouse committed a moral crime when it created Mellie and fixated her on Ballard, but Millie herself is a victim as surely as the young girl in the group home. She couldn't run away either. They'll find you, after all. They're bigger and stronger.

Then there's the ongoing plot about Dr. Saunders, who I'm now almost certain is a doll named Whiskey. I don't think Mr. Dominic wanted a drink at all, there. Alpha seems to know it too. I'm almost certain that "Saunders" is either the memories of a dead person, or is a synthetic persona. When Alpha escaped, he sliced up Whiskey and left her alive, probably killed the doctor. The Dollhouse looked at their dead doc, and their doll who wouldn't be going on too many more ~~tricks~~ dates and said "Waste not, want not."

Problems with the episode? I'm just going to mention the implausibility of Alpha and Ballard's easy access to the Dollhouse. Come on, people, no alarms in the only external systems access point? Not even a lock on the grate, for Christ's sake!

Let's review, shall we?

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear Plexiglas visors, not face concealing ones.
2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

Come on! It's number two on the list, right there! DeWitt, you are not doing your homework. The guys at the Centre are going to be pissed.

Not as pissed as I am when the show is cancelled, though. One to go, and one extra episode on the DVD boxed set with Felicia Day. Then, that's all she wrote.

The Ends of the World: Notes toward a taxonomy of apocalypses

2009-04-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

Riley: Buffy. When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.

I just finished Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (short review: good!) and it only occurred to me about halfway through the book that I was reading a completely new kind of post-apocalyptic novel.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it concerns the lonely sexbot Freya, who was activated shortly after the death of the last living human being. Indeed, a wee accident with the biosphere and global warming has boiled the Earth and left nothing alive in the inner solar system. Robots – thousands and thousands of conscious, human-equivalent robots – have formed their own society in the absence of human life. Much of the plot concerns various robot factions trying to clone and bring back human beings. This would itself be a kind of apocalypse for the robot society, because with their Three Laws conditioning, they would be enslaved anew.

Science fiction and fantasy are the only genres that regularly deal with the end of the world, outside of religious fiction. Naturally, they've come up with more than one variation on the idea. I thought I'd try to break them down by type. At first I thought it would be easiest to divide them up by the way the world ends, but I soon realized that it's the kind of stories the authors tell in the aftermath that are most distinctive. Here's a partial and incomplete list.

• Rebuilding from the ashes

Everything's broken, probably because it got nuked or maybe hit with an asteroid. But don't worry! Our intrepid heroes are going to make it all okay again. It'll just take some common sense, a little engineering know-how, and probably at least one fight with a group that wants chaos and madness. Before you know it, we'll all be growing crops in USA 2.0! This type of story allows authors to give citified 20th and 21st Century characters the pioneer/survivalist spirit. It has much in common with stories of colonizing uninhabited planets.

Classic Example: Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle.

• We're doomed!

The grim counterpart to the novel of rebuilding is the story in which it seems that no recovery is possible. More common in short fiction, this is the story that often stars the last few humans on Earth. Maybe some of them will make it, but it's not likely. Themes are more personal and literary, with a focus on moral choices.

Classic Example: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• Biker barbarians from Hell

Adventure stories in a post-apocalyptic setting often borrow more from the Mad Max films than from previous novels. These stories are about conflict, especially conflict between a remnant of civilization and the ever-present goons who want to loot it, burn it, and piss on the ashes.

Classic Example: The Road Warrior

Not So Classic Example: Waterworld (Christ, that was like a punch to the groin.)

• Inhuman hordes

Most people are familiar with this story thanks to George Romero's movies, but it doesn't have to be zombies that swarm over civilization. Vampires, mutants, infected folks, even aliens or demons will do just as well. Stories are about the survival of small groups, often thrown together. Interpersonal dynamics are key, and the threat from within the group, or from other surviving humans, is often as important as the threat from without.

Classic Example: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

• The quiet end

Sometimes the apocalypse isn't so bad. Some stories step back and take a surprisingly relaxed approach to the death of 99 per cent of the population. These stories often include dreamlike descriptions of cities returning to nature, and human survivors determined not to make the mistakes of their ancestors. By necessity, these are often plague stories, so as not to have to deal with too much radiation or nuclear winter.

Classic example: The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy

• The replacements

Humans are entirely gone, but something else has come to take our place. Maybe it's aliens, or maybe chimps have evolved intelligence, or maybe it's robots and AIs. Often, these stories are about the protagonist's attitude towards the vanished human species.

Classic Example: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross

• The surreal aftermath

Sometimes the end is just weird. Maybe magic comes back and causes chaos, as in Sean Stewart's excellent Galveston books. Maybe consensual reality actually breaks down, as in The Gone-Away War by Nick Harkaway. Whatever happens, all bets are off. Strangeness and coming to terms with a new and fantastic landscape is the order of the day, and elements of horror and fantasy slip into the tales.

Classic Example: Pollen, by Jeff Noon

• Earth is gone, but we're okay

In some tales, Earth is a talisman, a land that is now cut off from humans, even as they move off-planet. Dan Simmons Hyperion stories and even the Cowboy Bebop series both explored an Earth that was destroyed or seriously damaged, even as human life thrived elsewhere. The destruction of the Earth in these stories is often a symbolic touchstone, rather than a plot point.

Classic Example: Steel Beach, by John Varley

Aw, poop

2009-04-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

You can't tell anything from action/SF trailers. Really. Just watch the trailers for, say, Wolverine. You'd know that A) Hugh Jackman has claws and B) lots of stuff blows up really good.

Same with Star Trek. I know Simon Pegg's in it, Sulu's that stoner from Harold and Kumar, and Kirk rides a motorbike, and they're building the Enterprise, and some bald guy with tattoos has serious Ricardo Montalban envy, and, um... that's about it. I had no idea what the plot was about. None.

I did have a pretty strong opinion, as you may recall.

I swear to god, if Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise because he's mad at his father, I'm going to burn down a movie theatre.

Harsh words? Pointless hyperbole? Or shocking prophecy! From Paul McAuley's early review:

And it would good, too, if we could finally get away from the plot cliche in which the hero has to prove himself worthy of his father - in Kirk's case, not only his dead father, but the father-figure of Captain Pike, and the uber-father of the Academy. Been there, done that, got theStarship Troopers T-shirt.

Oh, J.J. Abrams, no!

Regency Madness!

2009-04-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

How many stories does it take to make a trend?

One of my friends, the Infamous Lisa, has already bought and is tearing through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the new super-high-concept book by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. If you haven't already heard about it – perhaps you've been living under a rock, or busy with the smoldering embers of RaceFail '09 – it's a literal re-writing of Austen's book to include hordes of the undead. And also ninjas. Two out of three of a nerd trifecta isn't bad. If the next book is a re-writing of Persuasion that includes pirates fighting ninjas who are also robots and zombies, it will have covered every possible nerd base.

Then I heard (via Torque Control) that one of the novelettes up for the Hugo this year is "Pride and Prometheus," a tale of when young Mary Bennett met Victor Frankenstein. (Just won the Nebula, too.) And hey, I already downloaded the whole Baum Plan for Financial Independence collection, so I'll read that this week.

These stories are directly Austen-derived, but the 900-pound gorilla in this burgeoning sub-genre is clearly Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Set during the Napoleonic wars, in a slightly alternate England, it is one of the better fantasy novels I've read in the past decade.

And a few years before Clarke was dipping into Austen's stomping grounds, Jasper Fforde was meddling with early Victorian literature with The Eyre Affair. It's set about 20 to 30 years later than Austen's works, and it is considerably more metafictional, so should we include The Eyre Affair in this list?

Personally, I've always felt that Jane Eyre was a story that needed a re-write of its own. Think about it – a mysterious Gothic mansion, strange noises in the attic, madness, fire, gypsies, fears of miscegenation. The first two thirds almost read like an H.P. Lovecraft story already. Now we just need to twist what's up in that locked attic room a little bit. Perhaps it's a white ape, or a woman slowly transforming for the dive past the reef at Innsmouth.

Are we really seeing the birth of yet another new sub-genre? Austenpunk doesn't really sound right, somehow. Maybe we should call it Regencypunk? Or is the -punk suffix completely inappropriate?

All I know right now is that I'm shortly going to tackle reading Pride and Prejudice, so I can properly understand Kessel's story and the tale of zombies and upper class society. Who says reading SF doesn't broaden your literary horizons?

"You're dead"

2009-04-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Dollhouse's latest episode, Haunted, didn't do much for me on the level of basic plot. The idea was good – someone who's brain has been scanned comes back from the dead to solve their own murder. But the execution felt like an episode of Murder She Wrote more than anything as cool as the last couple of episodes.

Really, the best part of the main plot was Boyd's comment that this really means the end of the world. If the rich can buy themselves new bodies when they die, what's to stop them from going on and on forever, erasing the poor but young once every twenty or thirty years?

I don't normally mentally re-write episodes, but last night I was fervently hoping that the murder would turn out to have been a suicide. If you knew that a friend would bring you back, and temporarily store you in the body of a super-healthy 25-year-old, wouldn't you be tempted to kill yourself and then hijack the new body? Sadly, no.

Side note: anyone interested in these plots from a more SFnal perspective should read some of the British SF that's come out over the past few years. Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod have both written several stories over the past few decades about downloadable, copy on demand minds. However, the best of the British brain-scanners is probably Richard Morgan and his Takeshi Kovacs series. Altered Carbon, the first in the loosely connected trilogy, is about an ex-soldier and ex-con who has to investigate a millionaire's apparent suicide. The millionaire – backed up from a copy – doesn't believe he killed himself. It's a world where the rich are immortal, and where bodies can be swapped around like cars. No synthetic personalities, but it's a very good, very grim look at similar technology.

Back to Dollhouse. The episode's saving grace was its two sub-plots. Predictably, Agent Ballard can't stop himself from abusing the privileges of the Dollhouse. It's also becoming clear just how vile the programming of Millie was; she's his willing slave without even being aware of it.

Topher's creation of a friend for his birthday was even more interesting. This seems like it was intended to showcase the positive side of the Dollhouse. What if you are alone, and strange, and no one gets you? Who do you turn to? Topher made a friend (someone who was probably 80 to 90 per cent based on himself) for his birthday. It was both heartwarming and creepy at the same time. I'm so glad they didn't have sex.

Not too many episodes left now. Fox is apparently going to announce the show's cancellation or renewal mid-May.

The True Story of Rudy the Undead Hound

2009-04-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from Toons for Breakfast: A history of the 1980s from 7 to 10 a.m.

...but one animator who didn't die in a Santa Cruz opium den was Fletcher Krall. Krall came to Hollywood in the early 1930s and managed to find work as an in-betweener for several studios, including Terrytoons. He did good work when sober, which usually, according to those who employed him, lasted from about 8 a.m. on Mondays to Wednesday afternoon. By mid-week, Krall would be starting a bender. Sometimes he'd be back the following week, and sometimes not.

After being fired by several studios, Krall surprised his peers by launching his own studio. Where he got the money was hotly debated at the time. Some claimed it was the inheritance left by a distant spinster aunt. Others claimed that a string of bank robberies in Arizona, which coincided with one of his lost weekends, were involved. When he'd had too much laudanum, Walt Disney was prone to claiming that Krall had made a deal with the devil. He claimed Satan had appeared to Krall in the form of a morbidly obese woman wearing a leopard print overalls and pink house slippers.

Regardless of the source of funding, it was sufficient to get Krall Kreations up and running. Within a few weeks, Krall had begun knocking out shorts and peddling them to the studios and distributors. It took just a few months before Krall got into trouble. His characters were both derivative, and, even for the time, deeply offensive. His most notorious was Mick the Drunken Irish Mouse, which prompted a lawsuit from Disney and an assassination attempt bankrolled by Joe Kennedy (see "The Many Murders of Old Joe Kennedy," Jules Bernstein, Oxnard University Press, 2003).

Krall's one success was Rudy the Undead Hound. The short was briefly packaged with a series of morality tale films including "Oh No! Marihuana!" and "Don't Put That In There" which were funded by an Episcopal church operating out of Santa Barbara. The church deacons were apparently under the impression that the shorts were about the dangers of Satanism. The deal briefly gave Krall enough capital to hire more animators, and a dozen Rudy shorts were finished between 1939 and 1941. Most prints are now sadly lost, although "Rudy, don't eat the kid!" was located on a Betamax tape in Muncie in 1991.

Bankrupted by the Disney lawsuit, Krall sold his characters one by one to buy money for Sterno. He disappeared in 1943, and recent research suggests he was one of the last victims of Hans Schernwink, the so-called "Sausage Monster" of Fresno. Likely Schernwink lured Krall with a bottle of cooking wine and then turned the animator into K Rations under his contract with the US Army.

Rudy the Undead Hound was the last character Krall sold. It passed through several hands, including a number of children's book publishers. No one managed to bring Rudy back to unlife, although Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) entertained his friends for years with the story of how he was once approached to create a Rudy book. He suggested it be called "The Hat Made of Kiddie Fat" and his publisher never brought it up again.

Finally in 1963, Rudy was resurrected, this time in comic book form. Competing with other funny animal books of the 1960s, he lived a shadow existence in the back pages of a number of titles, from Animal Funtime to Noah's Wacky Ark to Laugh 'Til it Hurts, all owned by Jollo Comics. Jollo's workaholic cartoonist Ed Franks wrote and drew most of Rudy's stories. In his new environment, Rudy very seldom ate children or invoked the powers of the unholy host, but his sidekicks, Lil Azathoth and Eyeless Ed were still part of Rudy's world. The backstory about Rudy being brought back from the dead by a friendly necromancer (Doc Koschei) was added during the comic book years, as was his propensity to howl "Ru-ru-ru-ru-rudy!"

Carl Barks famously despised Rudy, and would fly into unpredictable rages about "that fuckin' zombie dog" if it was mentioned in his presence. Franks, in turn, hated Barks, which led to their duel at The Oaks in New Orleans in 1969; Barks would later make the resulting scar on his arm "dance" as a party trick.

Rudy got his own title in 1972, (written by Anton LaVey, drawn by Jack Kirby) but it folded after four issues. The last and most famous of these, the so-called Black Issue, was rejected by the Comics Code Authority. The final report released by that body was heavily censored, but rumour suggested the issue had included detailed instructions on how to summon demons and make pacts with unholy forces, as well as a set of blueprints for a cheap electric car. The entire run was pulped, but at least three copies have surfaced over the years; all are believed to be owned by Donald Rumsfeld.

As a character, Rudy was scrapped, except for infrequent reprints in back pages.

During the 1980s cartoon boom, NBC needed a new property in a hurry to meet the burgeoning demand. Rudy was dusted off, slightly modified, and 66 episodes were made for the 1985 season. Principal animation was done by four separate Japanese studios, with the in-betweening done in North Korea by animators undergoing state-ordered Re-education Through Illustration. Rudy proved a surprise hit, and within months toys based on Rudy, Eyeless Ed and villain Grumblkin the Troll were flying off the shelves. There was a breakfast cereal (Rudyums) and a line of collectible cards. Some toys were so popular they caused problems when supplies ran short that Christmas; the RCMP had to break up a riot at a Winnipeg Eaton's when parents fought over the last Glowin' Red Eyes Rudy toy.

By the spring of 1985, Rudy was under attack. The Parents Television Council made Rudy the Undead Hound part of their weekly Hour of Hate, and listed it as the third most likely program to induce Satanism, after The Cosby Show and My Secret Identity. The PTC ignited a media storm with their claim that during episode 47, "The Graveyard of Hopes and Dreams," a nude sketch of Ladybird Johnson was briefly visible on the side of the tomb. NBC was forced to apologize and pull the episode from subsequent repeats; they blamed the North Korean animation staff. After the mass executions, the incident blew over, but Rudy was not renewed for a second season.

Rudy has not been forgotten by '80s animation fans, and the property was recently optioned by Michael Bay...

[So, if you're wondering what all this was about, go here. Read. Listen.]

Update: Want a Rudy T-Shirt? I'm doing a charity fundraiser, and this is your one and only chance to get one.

Who's your daddy? Lost's sad obsession

2009-04-18T22:06:00.000-07:00

I've been an intermittent watcher of Lost for the past couple of seasons. It looked like things were getting better last year, and I started watching again regularly, only to have my hopes dashed this year.

I've already written about how I don't expect Lost will ever make any goddamn sense at all. Today I'm going to rant about something even worse than the show's total lack of narrative coherence. Today we're going to talk about Daddy Issues.

Here's a brief list of all the characters I can think of who have serious issues with at least one parental unit.

Jack (dad)

Hurley (dad)

Sawyer (dad, plus Locke's dad)

Sayyid (dad)

Kate (dad and mom)

Sun (dad)

Jin (dad and father in law - bonus points!)

Ben (dad)

Walt (dad)

Claire (dad abandoned her, was also Jack's dad)

Miles (time travel dad)

Penny (dad)

Locke (dad - possibly the worst dad in the history of bad dads)

This list is by no means comprehensive. I'm sure we'll later find out that the smoke monster's creator never tucked it in at night, and also that the flight attendant who died on impact had a troubled relationship with her step father, and that the guy who gassed up the plane has always wondered who his sperm-donor father really was (it was probably Christian).

Last week we got the big reveal that Miles' dad had abandoned him, he never knew the guy, blah blah whatever. If I rolled my eyes any harder I'd detach a retina. It's just not interesting. It's not a surprise any longer, not after five seasons of bad dad whining.

John Locke is the standard bearer for this. While Jack's relationship has been given a massive amount of back story, Locke is the only character to lose not one, but two major organs to his father.

I remember when my girlfriend and I watched the Locke loses a kidney episode. After a while, as his father kept screwing up his life, I started making a joke about it. "If his dad stole his spine too, you owe me a Coke," I said. Damned if I didn't get a Coke a season later.

I don't hate this contrivance just because it's overused to a truly ludicrous degree. There are two reasons why I think this is more than simple bad writing.

First, I worry about what this says about the writers. Why is the only plot that ever recurs on Lost with any frequency, the only thread never dropped, the plot that suggests you've never really gotten over the time daddy didn't come to your little league game? To me, it says that Lost's writing staff doesn't actually know how to write an adult relationship. They don't have a lot of characters who are parents, or even in stable marriages. The bad-dad trope indicates a show by, and about, immature man-children who refuse to stand on their own. You know what? Some of us liked our fathers. Some of us are actually happy with how we were raised. If we had issues as kids, we've gotten over them. As audience members, we're just fucking baffled.

Second, I think it actually says something about American society at large that this is the sort of plot that not only gets trotted out on Lost constantly, but on a lot of other so-called serious dramas. (Battlestar Galactica was not averse to using it.)

I have a hypothesis that Americans no longer have any ideology. Sure, they think they believe in political causes. But America is one of the most politically homogeneous democracies in the world. In continental Europe, almost every country has far right parties and far left parties, and by right I mean "they have SS uniforms in their closets" and by far left I mean hard line communist. The middle of the spectrum is generally broader, with labour and social democrat parties competing with liberals, neo-liberals and conservatives who'd be more recognizable in the States. This means that there is a larger philosophical spectrum – people may have actually thought once or twice in their lives about the ethics of private property vs. public, about political economy, about nationalism.

Even in Canada, where I live, there is still a shadow of a social democrat movement. Britain also has a wider spectrum of political opinion.

Despite the fact that Americans generally only disagree with each other on a handful of issues, they take sides as though it was Nazis vs. Soviets. The divide is pretty wide. Weirdly so, to an outsider.

What that means, in practice, is that TV writers don't have very strong opinions on a lot of issues, because on average, Americans don't either. And where they do have strong opinions – usually only on Culture War hot buttons – they don't dare risk slipping them into their stories. So they can't write stories about big ethical and political issues that are invisible to most Americans, and they won't write about the few issues Americans actually care about, because it would alienate too much of their audience.

So you wind up with a strange phenomenon on American TV: no character thinks about ethics. Characters seldom take sides over well-defined moral or religious positions. What are the differences between Locke and Jack, the differences that the writers yammer on and on about in interviews? Faith vs. Reason? Bullshit!

Whenever possible, the writers use the flashbacks to show us that Character A took Action X on the island because Event Y happened to him in the flashback. Most often, this event was something involving a bad dad. So the characters aren't acting based on ethics or beliefs. They're automatons, mechanistically reacting to what has come before. It's like the whole thing is a giant trick pool shot, with one ball bouncing off another until the plot is resolved. It robs the main characters of agency, choice, and free will.

Do other popular SF shows employ this trope? I've mentioned that BSG does it from time to time, but not nearly as often. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is notable because the main character actually has a deadbeat dad – whom we almost never hear about. Buffy barely mentions him. She's over that crap. Fox Mulder famously had issues with his father, but they were a tiny fraction of his overall fucked up personality, and we didn't get episode after episode in which Scully and Skinner and Cancer Man and Krycek trotted out their daddy issues. The Star Trek franchise barely touches the issue. Deanna Troi's mom is mostly used for comic relief. If the other characters have issues, they're often resolved in the space of one episode.

Which leads me back to J.J. Abrams again, and the upcoming Star Trek movie.

I swear to god, if Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise because he's mad at his father, I'm going to burn down a movie theatre.

ETA: It would be unfair of me to not mention Charlie, the only character who we know had a good relationship with his father. In his final episode with flashbacks, one of his favourite memories is being taught to swim by his father. This was also one of the best uses of the flashback structure since we learned that Locke was paraplegic, way back in season one.

The Fringe-Gnome business plan

2009-04-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

I've previously watched two (2) episodes of Fringe. The first was the pilot, which was meh. The second involved the mysterious albino boy in the sub basement last week. I was thinking of getting back into it. Hey, nothing else was on, Dollhouse appears to be on the verge of cancellation. I need my SF TV.

Anyway, the teaser for this week's episode, Unleashed, intrigued me. Frankly, I was hoping for werewolves. No such luck. Spoiler time now.

So a bunch of animal rights activists break into a lab, they find a dark and ominous door lit with red light bulbs, it's obvious bad news. Really, the only way it could be worse is if it contained the rage virus. Instead, it's a big scary thing that kills them and infests their corpses with larvae. The Steward of Gondor, Pacey, Token Black Woman, and Scully-the-Lesser are called in to investigate and decide it's some kind of chimera, created by putting lots of animals together in a blender and pressing "Evil." Denethor's all "Oh, boo hoo, maybe this terrible monster is based on my research," like he's the only mad scientist on the block. Nope. Turns out that a totally different group had the same idea he did. And they did more than draw awesome snake/scorpion hybrid sketches. Which will totally go on the cover of my first metal album, by the way.

Boring story short, FBI Agent Scully-the-Lesser tracks down the last of the animal rights activists and discovers his dad runs a local animal testing firm. Son decided to free the animals, stumbled on Dad's seriously ill conceived lab project. Our heroes kill the beastie in the sewers; there is angst and sexual tension, and it is boring.

Here's the thing: who in their right mind would create a hybrid wasp/tiger/snake/scorpion/bat? And how can I not comment on the impossibility of melding together creatures with such divergent basic bodyplans? No matter how much you know about Hox genes, I don't think you can just successfully weld a wasp and a bat together. They're not like multiple Lego sets; you can't just snap castle parts on the spaceship.

And what was it for in the first place? It's like an Underpants gnome scheme.

• Step 1: Create hideous, giant, violent, uncontrollable monster

• Step 2: ???

• Step 3: Profit!!!

What's worse, no one in the episode asks either Denethor (who's done this kind of work before) or the eeeeevil animal testing guy why they would want to do it. That's a pretty good question, yes?

Possible answers:

• "The villagers were getting uppity. They needed a good scare. What do you want? I'm mad, mad I tell you, bwah hah hah hah!"

• "Dude, it's so fucking cool! Can we give version 2.0 retractable adamantium claws and teach it to say 'Bub'?"

• "I don't know, Blackwater ordered it. Crowd control for Katrina victims. We may have overdesigned it a bit."

• "Well, if you don't spend all the money the Pentagon gives you every year, they give you less next year."

You know the first thing people would actually create, if they could make crazy hybrids? They'd make real-life Turducken. And that would be way cooler than this episode.

You had me at 'dinosaurs,' Sims

2009-04-14T17:51:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that Chris Sims' Invincible Super Blog is the best place for out-of-context Silver Age comics panels, serious ruminations on Anita Blake and Wolverine, and kicks to the face. But did you know he also writes comics? Comics so deliriously over the top that they rival Dr. McNinja for silliness?

You didn't?

Then you need to click this link. Now. Go. Read about Solomon Stone, the half-vampire skateboarding champion and scourge of badness everywhere. Everything else on the Internet will keep.

There are dinosaur ghosts!

I've said enough. If you aren't going to check it out, you have no soul.

Belated thoughts on the BSG finale

2009-04-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Cosmology of Ron Moore

The music of the spheres is the whiny, nasal, drone of Bob Dylan.

This one is a ghost, a resurrected Jesus-figure, the one who will lead the ~~Israelites~~ Colonials to the promised land. She was never really there, except in spirit. And now, her mighty task done, she is free to move on to... whatever Ron Moore believes is on the other side. Presumably Starbuck and brain-damaged Anders are now kicking back with a god who cares so much about his people that he let 60 billion or so get nuked before he started to intervene. He's probably got a wicked sense of humour, that one.

Meanwhile, this pair below are angels. Angels, the emissaries of god. The messengers who've been helping to guide the fleet with visions. And their chosen prophets? One is a sex-mad egomaniacal atheist scientist, prone to creating harems at every opportunity, craven and easily manipulated, and almost as bad a political leader as Roslin and Adama (the Dick Cheney of Space). The other is a genocidal baby-killing fembot who, if you think about it for five minutes, really belongs in an Austin Powers movie more than in a serious SF drama. She's a religious fanatic who showed her remorse for her baby-killing ways by putting humans into concentration camps, because that was much more humane. Naturally, both are well qualified to be prophets of this brave new age.

And what will take place in this brave new age? Well, everyone has turned their back on all their sins and glories, all their technology, all their knowledge, all their accumulated written, artistic and manufactured culture, and they've decided to spend the rest of their lives dying of childbirth, animal attacks, malaria and chronic malnutrition. Yay!

Asking the Wrong Questions has put this better than I could when she called the ending cowardly and questioned whether you can, in any sense, call it a science fiction show. SF is supposed to look forward and suggest the way things might happen, whether as prediction or allegory. Battlestar turned its back on that and suggested that what everyone really needs to do is to wipe the slate completely clean every few thousand years and start over again, banging bits of chert into hand axes. At least you know that a stone axe isn't going to suddenly ask you tough questions about the role of government, the nature of humanity, or the proper atonement for past sins.

It's hard to either offer review or criticism of a television show in the way that it can be offered for a book or a movie. Both reviews (is this any good?) and criticism (what does this mean?) require seeing the whole text spread out before you. Yet television is reviewed on the basis of one to four episodes, in most cases. So an acclaimed series, like BSG, is acclaimed long before we know where it's going to end. Ultimately, our critical machinery for reviewing serialized drama is weak.

If we could go back now and offer all of BSG to some past reviewer, to pick over, they'd probably say the mini-series and season one were pretty good, there were some real high points in season two, and it was downhill from there. Some aspects worked much better than others. It did space battles and action very well, not something to sneeze at. The dialogue and characterization was usually quite good. When it came to politics, it often fell flat on its face. It relied on mysticism and visions far too much. It confused pride with dignity, and it shamelessly took sides, elevating some characters (Adama, Roslin, Lee) and denigrating others (Baltar, Gaeta, Zarek) when in truth their actions were not that different.

As my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful, put it, the best thing about the finale was the cute dancing robots.

"We're pimps and killers, but in a philanthropic way."

2009-04-11T16:51:00.000-07:00

Everyone got to say what was on their mind about the Dollhouse this week, but no one asked Mr. Dominic the pertinent question before packing him off to the attic: was the chip in the chair his?

This week's episode (A Spy in the House of Love, nice title) played with time a little bit, starting off with blood on a window and looping back several times to watch as actives were imprinted and sent out on their various internal missions.

Yeah, yeah. Spoilers.

Every mission turned out to be internal this week. Sierra was made into a super spy, Echo became a top interrogator/sleuth, November/Mellie continued working for the Dollhouse, but was also having her strings pulled by the mysterious insider. Even Victor turned out to be working for the Dollhouse, sent off on his tenth Miss Lonely Hearts engagement with (dum dum DUM!) DeWitt.

The plot all starts with Topher, tearing down the chair after Echo/Caroline pumped it full of lead last week, and he discovers the chip that has the grubby fingerprints of a spy all over it. Except not literally. Because that would have made for a shorter episode. I imagine gloves were involved.

Anyway, our core four actives are all dolled up and sent out. Sierra's picked for the infiltration, apparently because she resembles an NSA employee, and they suspect the NSA is behind the chipping. Echo comes to Topher and asks to be imprinted, because she's a keener that way. So now it's a race between the two dolls to see which one can come up with the spy faster.

Meanwhile, DeWitt is enjoying a weekend with Victor, who's been Britishified and knows all about the Dollhouse, so he's the perfect confessor/lover for DeWitt.

About their little tryst: first, I'm going to indulge in a little, wee rant on fencing. No, no, FUCKING NO!

Dear TV Writers: You cannot write fencing scenes. You do not know how to fence. You have not even seen it done, so you have no fucking idea what you are doing. People do not fence bare armed and faced. That's a good way to get covered with welts and lose an eye. Second, fencing gear is standardized, your tight-fitting corset thingies with low collars are not appropriate; you'd actually be better off wearing street clothes than those ridiculous garments. Third, you cannot cut anyone with a fencing foil. They are blunt of edge, as are epees and sabres. See above, re: welts. Fourth, while it is clear that some fight arranger spent five minutes teaching both actors how to stand (feet shoulder-width apart, right foot forward, left foot back and at right angles) this does not mean that we will forgive them for their jumping around like drugged frogs. You cannot change positions while fencing, and you do not cross blades and glare at one another. Such antics are best left in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Ahem. Sorry about that. Just a little pet peeve of mine. Now, on to the more serious question raised by DeWitt's vacation.

I'm just going to ask: how is this different from what Sierra's handler, or any of Echo's or the others' clients do to them? How is it different from what the Dollhouse did to Mellie, by setting her up to artificially fall for Ballard? Informed consent is utterly absent from any of these couplings. Rape may be the only appropriate word, and Boyd is the one who comes closest to articulating that. If he and the doctor are both so cynical about the Dollhouse (although in different ways, as she says) why are they there?

Oh yeah, and there was a plot, too.

Ballard welcomes Mellie back home with paranoia and door locks, and she tries to calm him down from his pursuit of the Dollhouse. It looks like he's following the money. Suddenly Mellie's gone, and Agent Helo's faced with the old My Girlfriend is a Cylon deal again. She tells him to keep investigating the Dollhouse's true purpose – and not to tell Mellie anything or act like anything's up. Adding another layer of creepy to the layer cake the show has already been stacking together.

So Sierra Aliases her way into NSA headquarters and sends back the info that the mole is Topher's assistant Ivy. But Echo's sussed out that the info was planted: Dominic was way too relaxed when he heard the news that Sierra had succeeded. He's the mole. There's some nice kung fu (much better then last week's, but it's no Chinese restaurant kitchen knife fight) and Dominic goes down. He's off to the attic, which is apparently a place where your every thought is just out of reach – a permanent state of mental fog. No wonder he tries to kill himself and gives DeWitt a flesh wound. Thus leading to the blood on the window.

The best moment in the episode, the one that sent a little chill through my spine, was when Echo and Dominic were alone for a moment in the back of one of the black vans. He's beaten, but he looks at her and says she'll erase them all, in the end.

Overall, another top episode for the show. Christ, if this gets cancelled, I'm going to be really pissed. Much more than I would have been if it had gone away after five episodes.

The (Old) New Weird: Martha Wells

2009-04-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, was the weird tale. Like science fiction and fantasy, it's debateable when it first emerged, but we can all look back at H.P. Lovecraft and definitively say "Yep, that's pretty effin' weird right there." As with punk rock, it's much easier to point to a definitive example (the Ramones) than to root around looking for precursors.

So when we talk about the New Weird, it's easy to point at Jeff VanderMeer or China Miéville's work and say, "Yep, that's pretty new and pretty effin' weird." But like the Ramones, they did not emerge fully formed, and we can find examples of weirdness that may not even have influenced the modern practitioners directly, but which came before them.

The preceding is just a long way of saying that I'm going to be talking, occasionally, about some authors who wrote weird stuff. Starting today with Martha Wells.

In the 1990s, Wells wrote three fantasy novels for Tor, all pretty well reviewed, which chipped away at the conventions of fantasy literature. By 1993, when The Element of Fire was published, we were 16 years into Terry Brooks Shannara series, the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was three years old, and any number of people were starting to immitate those authors, rather than drawing inspiration directly from Tolkein or the original myths. Fantasy was settling into what it largely remains today: the realm of thick-as-a-brick books that come in lengthy series. All those books more or less mined from Tolkein's work, so you had a seemingly endless number of semi-European, quasi-medieval quests and knights and wizards and the whole fantastic cladogram of near-human species.

The Element of Fire has swords, it is true, but it also has firearms. Hero Thomas Boniface lives in an Elizabethan-style world, in the nation of Ile-Rien, whose capital Vienne is a mashup of Paris and London, circa 1550. And there are magicians, although they're usually addressed as Doctor, and they study at an analogue of Oxford. There are non-humans, but they're wild faeries, representing chaos and madness. Our second protagonist, Kade Carrion, is half-fey and the heir to great powers, and not entirely a good guy.

And there are fights with rapiers. I'm going to just take a minute here to say a personal thank you to Ms. Wells for this book. I fence. That is, I go to school gymnasiums and community centres, put on white jacket and gloves and a mesh mask, and practice trying to hit other people with analogues of 18th Century court swords. I am not very good at this. But even someone who is not very good quickly becomes frustrated by the boring descriptions of any kind of swordplay in a standard fantasy novel. Therefore, anything with actual rapiers, and with decently written fight scenes, and duels, is a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Ms. Wells.

Of course, I never would have guessed it's anything unusual from the jacket copy. Whoever was writing back-cover stuff for Tor back in '93 clearly didn't know what the hell they were holding. Check out the header: "Where high-tech wizardry meets fairy magic and a kingdom hangs in the balance..." It has wheel-lock pistols! This is high tech? It's like even gunpowder totally baffled the fantasy division.

As to the plot of the book, you can find it and read it yourself. (Again, ignore the back cover. The king's sister is not our for revenge, among other problems.) The Element of Fire is good, but her later two books would outshine it.

In 1997, Wells returned to Ile-Rien and the city of Vienne, this time several hundred years later for The Death of the Necromancer. It's now a city with steam engines and trains (which help keep the dastardly faeries away, all those iron rails, you know). And Nicholas Valiarde is the city's greatest thief, out for revenge on the man who caused the death of his adoptive father. Meanwhile, he's being pursued by the city's greatest sleuth, a consulting detective who keeps company with a medical doctor.

Yes, in the midst of some marvelous gaslight fantasy, we're treated to the Count of Monte Cristo/Moriarty being pursued by Holmes and Watson. Soon, of course, there is dark necromancy and even revenge has to take a back seat to preventing an apocalypse. Except for one section near the end where the action bogs down for several chapters, it's an almost perfect book.

Two things about the book always strike me. The first is that Wells implies a lengthy history for all her characters. There's a real sense that we're coming in on the fourth or fifth book in a series, that in some parallel world The Strand has been publishing Valiarde stories for years. If we could just dig up those older stories, we'd see how Valiarde met and recruited his band of thieves, eccentrics, wrongly-accused cracksmen and opium-addicted sorcerers.

The second I didn't realize until years later, because I read Death of the Necromancer before Element of Fire. This is the fact that Valiarde, the anti-hero of Necromancer, is actually descended from Denzil, the villain of Element of Fire. It's an odd but appropriate choice, because Valiarde is not your average good guy. At one point he notes that his first impulses are almost always wrong; he has to fall back on the moral teachings of his adoptive father and think about what's right and wrong. Valiarde at first pursues the story's true villain because the necromancer discovers his identity; after that it eventually becomes a vendetta for him. Justice and revenge, for Valiarde, are quite similar.

I've left City of Bones for last, although it was published between the two Ile-Rien novels. While Ile-Rien was one of many attempts by authors to tug fantasy out of Generic Medieval Europe, City of Bones is full-on New Weird, before there was any such category.

The main character is Khat, who lives in a city on the edge of a massive desert riven by steep canyons and infested by dangerous creatures. Khat is not human; instead he's some kind of near-human whose race was created in the distant past. And he has a pouch, like a marsupial. Oh, and the soldiers in the city of Charisat use rifles powered by brass air reservoirs, so they have to pump the pressure up between shots. And there are strange mind-magics and knife fights and racial politics. And I'm saying this from memory because I've been trying to find a copy of this book again for the past several years, and not only does it not turn up in my local used book stores, but my library has no more copies! Dammit!

City of Bones has stuck in my mind since I first read it in the mid-1990s. If it were published today, it would easily be filed as New Weird, and people would compare Wells to other authors working in that tradition. But it was published too early; the reviews of it at the time couldn't even agree if it was fantasy, science fiction, horror or a combination of the three. These days, that's often how the New Weird is defined: as a melding of all three genres, much like the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

There are plenty of Martha Wells books out there that I haven't even touched on, including a three-book cycle that features Nicholas Valiarde's daughter going on a dimension-hopping expedition. Check them out.

Next time on (Old) New Weird: Tim Powers.

"Echo?"

2009-04-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

The April 3 episode of Dollhouse, "Needs," was another in the good column for me. I have a few quibbles, but this felt like a solid mid-range example of a high quality show.

It's pretty clear now that we've been watching two shows. The first ran for five episodes and was a high-concept show about a girl who got a new personality every week. Fox loved that show, but its execution was sort of half-assed. Plots were often pulled out of the Big Bin O' TV Clichés, and while they were often filmed with verve and had a few nice twists, they were still nothing to inspire cultish adoration.

Then this second show started up. It's an ensemble drama, about people in a secret business where zombified volunteers get new personalities every week. Some of them have been brainwiped, some of them are doing the wiping, and some are trying to figure it all out. It's a much better program, because it can attack its subject matter from multiple angles.

My few little problems with "Needs"? Spoilers, hereafter.

First, while I liked the idea that they need to give the dolls some emotional closure, it seemed like the way they went about it was pretty dangerous. I don't know that the handler with broken shins and the one who was strangled half to death will appreciate DeWitt going with that plan. They should talk to their union reps.

Related to the broken shins, that fight scene was not nearly as well shot as the kitchen kung fu fight from a few weeks back. It was jerky and hard to follow. However, the final fire extinguisher to the knees moment went over well. I was watching the show with about 20 people (Go Browncoats!) and a collective "OHHHH!" was heard after the impact.

We also found out that Sierra was apparently not a willing conscript to the Dollhouse way of life, even if the rest of them were. Seriously, why did the show decide she'd be a perpetual rape victim? If she gets shoved in a refrigerator just to make Victor upset, I will not be happy.

Which leads to my final quibble. Sierra strongly implied that she didn't achieve closure at all: she wants to go back and get some real revenge. I doubt that Echo/Caroline can ever quiet whatever it is inside her that makes her want to set people free. And Victor? You don't get over being in love. Not just like that. So their little vacation may have given them some temporary closure, but for at least three out of four, I doubt they'll stay quiet for long. I'm not sure if this is a real complaint or not, because it may be intentional on the part of the writers.

On the plus side, it's always nice to see Amy Acker back, and her character represents another weird paternalistic face of the Dollhouse.

So far we've seen DeWitt as this arch, patrician figure who seems to feel that what they're doing is in the dolls' best interests (despite seemingly knowing that Sierra was kidnapped?), a means justify the ends philosophy. Mr. Dominic sees them as pets, or machines; he's effectively dehumanized them. Topher doesn't think about it much, and when he's forced to he babbles and can't justify himself at all.

The doctor, on the other hand, wants to protect the dolls from the big bad world. She obviously feels it would be better for them not to remember things. As I'm sure she might wish for herself.

Outside the world of Dollhouse, the TV show, things are not going well. It was low in the ratings again. But I want to know something more basic: is Dollhouse profitable?

Battlestar Galactica had fewer viewers than Dollhouse for every episode it aired after the mini-series. It seems to have averaged around 2.5 million viewers a week. Meanwhile, Dollhouse has been averaging between 3.5 and 4 million viewers. I know the costs for maintaining an entire network are different from those involved in running a cable channel. But BSG also involved a very large cast, lots of specially constructed sets, explosions and a whack of CGI. Dollhouse, on the other hand, is cheap like borscht. It has fight scenes and gunfire, but only a handful of sets. No CGI. No elaborate prosthetic makeupe. No wirework. It's the cheapest show Joss Whedon has ever made.

So here's the thing. I don't want to know if Dollhouse is beating its competition. I want to know if it's actually just breaking even or turning a profit for Fox. And I'd kind of like to know if it could do the same, say, at a cable channel whose name means venereal disease in Polish.

"Good night, folks."

2009-04-01T07:12:00.000-07:00

I was saddened yesterday to learn that Andy Hallett, who played Lorne on Angel for four seasons, died of heart disease. He was just 33.

As one of the people who brought the funny in a big way, he'll be missed.

Common roadsigns of Arrakis

2009-03-31T21:55:00.001-07:00

Because sometimes I'm just bored. And while I can't draw, I can Photoshop.

My next project? WorkSafe warnings for the gom jabbar.

Have you seen my drawer of inappropriate starches?

2009-03-28T08:32:00.000-07:00

Everyone's inappropriate drawers get opened in this week's episode of Dollhouse, Echoes. Wow, that's a metaphor you won't see too many other places.

Many, many, many spoilers. Shoo. Go and get the ep on iTunes if you haven't seen it.

This was another episode that was actually good. Damn good. (I've seen reaction that suggests some liked it better than last week's. Me, I prefer episodes that have kung fu kitchen fighting, but your mileage may vary.) It had everything I want – a mixture of use of the dolls, behind the scenes stuff at the Dollhouse, science fiction stuff, drugs, comedy.

So our plot starts with a college kid hallucinating in a lab. When his friends come in and try to help him, they get the giggles. He smashes his head against a plate glass window until he's dead. Okay, show, you've got my attention.

We also learn a little more about Caroline becoming Echo. DeWitt had apparently pursued her for about two years before she finally pinned her down and convinced her to sign a five-year deal to become a doll.

From there, we segue into a plot about a stolen memory drug – clearly the drug that killed Kid A in our opening sequence – nabbed from the Rossum corporation. Ah, I believe we have a nerdkenning there. Topher says the dolls will be immune to its effects because of the way their memory has been blocked. So a big old herd of dolls is sent out, (as with flock of birds and pod of whales, may I suggest an amnesia of dolls?) with Victor in charge as an "NSA" agent, Sierra as a "CDC doctor," and Dominic as their surly minder. They'll check out the university campus where Rossum's lab is located, where the drug is apparently spreading among the student population.

Is Echo with them? Why no, she's off for a date/prostitution engagement with the young millionaire from way back in episode one. As Alice, she is a very innocent young thing, who likes wearing six inch heels and thigh-high lace stockings. Thanks for driving home the skeeviness of the whole operation there, guys. Of course, she's just tied her client to the bed when she catches a news report about the mess over at the university. She suddenly has to go. She's remembering...

And that's where the whole thing comes together. Boyd trails Echo to the campus, where he quickly becomes infected with the hallucinogen. It's spreading by touch, which we soon learn as Topher and DeWitt both also become infected. And it does affect dolls, it just does so in a different way, giving them flashbacks, memory glitches to either their previous lives as false personalities, or to their real lives. Echo remembers Caroline, and remembers her boyfriend being shot by Rossum guards. Sierra remembers being raped. November remembers being Mellie, and almost remembers being a killer assassin while she's three feet from DeWitt. Victor remembers being a soldier somewhere in the Middle East.

Everything gets tied up, more or less, with just a few loose ends flying around regarding the dolls and the imperfect nature of their brainwipes.

One of the most important developments of this episode is that the drug affects dolls and regular humans differently. So we now know (say to 90 per cent certainty) that Boyd, Dominic, DeWitt and Topher are not dolls. Because they were just hilariously tripping.

We're also getting more about the links between the Dollhouse and outside organizations. Rossum is supposed to be the biggest pharmaceutical firm in the world. But after meeting its CEO, DeWitt remarks off-handedly to Topher that it's CEO is more or less the runner up for her job. Rossum is a junior partner of the Dollhouse, and apparently one of their research divisions.

So that's two pretty damn good episodes, five that are a bit shaky. The average is improving.

Why are all the good shows mid-season replacements?

2009-03-26T07:23:00.001-07:00

First there was Dollhouse, which finally shook off the shackles of mediocritude to stand revealed as awesome, and now there's Better Off Ted.

Better Off Ted (or BOT, as true afficionados will doubtless call it) is about, um, Ted, who manages the research division at Veridian Dynamics. They do everything. Seriously, everything. Drugs, materials, food, highly dubious weapons experiments. It's like they're a combination of 3M, Pfizer, Enron and Lockheed-Martin.

You could not have picked a better time to satirize corporate America. The closer companies get to taking a dirt nap, the more insane the behaviour of the higher-ups gets. (Not that I've been getting increasingly cheerful emails from my glorious leaders while the company stock price plumets like a solid-lead lemming.) So there's more of a built-in audience for this than there was a year or two ago.

It's also actually funny. It's a sort of rapid-fire, off-kilter show, with lots of weird little surreal touches and SF bits. It's not designed as a real SF show, but the science fiction components (cryonic freezing, meat grown in a lab) are actually fairly good and realistic ones. They're not as funny as the TowelMiser, but you can't ask for too much.

Better Off Ted is growing on me. Growing like a hunk of throbbing artificial lab meat. Growing like the pile of stolen coffee creamers. Growing like killer mold on a weaponized pumpkin.

Fine, push all my nerd buttons at once

2009-03-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

So I was just thinking to myself the other day, man, it's been a while since I've done any serious RPGing. I really need to slay a dragon or use psychic powers to fight space vampires or something. But what sort of game?

And then I get the news, (via Torque Control) that China Miéville's New Crobuzon trilogy is being turned into an RPG.

"The city of New Crobuzon is an incredibly rich setting," said Adamant Entertainment owner Gareth-Michael Skarka. "We're extremely proud to be producing a game that gives it the level of detail and attention that it deserves."

"I grew up on RPGs," said China Miéville, "And the idea of a Bas-Lag game is incredibly exciting and humbling. That people might want to play in the world of my books is a tremendous honour."

The game will also feature a special treat for Miéville's fans – the original map of the city of New Crobuzon, drawn by the author, as well as his own illustrations of some of the creatures found in the world of Bas-lag.

So yeah, I might just be buying that.

This is probably not the first RPG to be created at least partly by a socialist, but it may be the first American RPG to be based on material that's openly pro-revolution. I wonder if it'll come with a Coles Notes version of the Communist Manifesto?

"There are three flowers in a vase..."

2009-03-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

OhmygodholyshitchristonacrutchwowiezowiejesusmurphyholycowthatwasAWESOME!

Warning: many, many spoilers for "Man on the street."

Ah, it's like the gods of television heard my prayer last week. I said Dollhouse was promising, very promising, but it needed to actually do something to live up to that promise or it would stagnate. We'd had five episodes in a row in which Echo and/or the other dolls went on jobs, and there was a bit of behind the scenes machinations/mytharc stuff, but mostly they were one offs. The best of the bunch, to my mind, was the heist episode. And even that one was just pretty good for a Joss Whedon show.

This week, as Boyd pounded one of his fellow handlers through a plate glass window, I looked at my watch, thinking so much had already happened, the episode must almost be finished. We were just 30 minutes in. Still to come was the kung fu kitchen fight, the revelation of multiple dollhouses, the further revelation of a spy within this Dollhouse, the further further revelation that Agent Helo's next door neighbour is, in fact, a ~~cylon~~ doll. Which I totally called, by the way. Anyone who doubted me? You all owe me a Coke.

This is what Dollhouse can do well. It can turn everything we know about the world upside down. Anyone could be anything. I've speculated before about how many of the Dollhouse employees are actually actives. Boyd? Mr. Dominic? DeWitt? Topher? We don't know. Although Whedon himself has suggested, in an interview with TV Without Pity, that it won't just degenerate into PKDian weirdness.

"Yes, we talked about that – the different possibilities that we could tweak, the pasts that people have, and how many layers of unreality you can have in somebody's identity. And, to an extent, we get very excited. We have to pull ourselves back and say, "If we make this a lie within a lie within a lie within a lie, people are just going to start slapping us."

This whole episode gives me hope that this can be the show I want it to be: a mix of well-thought-out SFnal ideas, character, and kick ass fight scenes. So I'm totally on board now.

Me Teesa, you... seriously expect me to buy this dialogue?

2009-03-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

I started S.M. Stirling's The Sky People with all the enthusiasm in the world. I'd enjoyed Stirling's alternate British Empire in India novel The Peshwar Lancers, and this book promised to be even better. Dinosaurs! On Venus! And cave people and sabretooths and US/Soviet Cold War shennanigans! Awesome!

Well, it could have been awesome. In truth, it was only adequate. Stirling doesn't promise more than he can deliver here: it's an adventure novel that deliberately harkens back to the early- to mid-20th Century planetary romances and Golden Age SF novels in which life is abundant on both Mars and Venus. The Edgar Rice Burroughs novels are an obvious source of inspiration, but plenty of other well-known authors, from Asimov to Heinlein, have stocked Venus with life.

Stirling updates this trope by creating an alternate world which is very similar to ours, but in which life is identified by the 1950s on both of Earth's nearest neighbours. The Cold War cools down as the Soviets and Chinese compete with the Americans and Brits to build ships and eventually bases on the two planets. By the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, they've both accomplished their goals, and they're trying to figure out why there are recognizably human (and neandertal) people on Venus, along with the aforementioned dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters.

From this point on, there are spoilers. You have been warned.

Our hero is Marc Vitrac, an American lieutenant (of course) with the military/science outpost on Venus. Marc is about as dull a hero as you could have. He's brave and stalwart, young and handsome and square of jaw, and just a little bit too headstrong for his own good. He came from Planetary Adventure Central Casting, which may have been a conscious choice on Stirling's part. His only distinguishing features to my mind are his constant musings on how the Earth people sent to Venus are both physically and mentally top notch, the best of the best (which a cynical person could interpret as making him a closet eugenicist) and his constant use of Cajun dialect. Marc's from the bayou, you see.

Which fits him in perfectly with all his fellow Earth-human characters, every one of whom is distinguished by their national/racial/linguistic tics. There's Cynthia, the black scientist from New York. There's Christopher, the ~~totally not French~~ English toff, ("I say, dear boy!") there's the Lithuanian-Soviet Binkis, and there's Teesa, of the Cloud Mountain People. Stirling's characters are types, rather than people. If you were hoping to develop a deep and sustained interest in them as well-rounded folks, forget it. This is an adventure novel.

Well, it's an adventure novel after the first 150 pages or so. The opening portion of the book, which is in many ways my favourite part, is an extended tour through Stirling's worldbuilding. Cynthia goes fossil hunting, Marc shows the others around the bronze age Venusian city near their base, we see dinosaurs and giant wolf-critters. Marc tames a giant feral wolfoid puppy. It's all very relaxed and plot-free. The most significant bit of info is that Venus was obviously terraformed, starting 200 million years in the past, by something that then periodically dumped Earth species there. Which explains the dinosaurs, cave people, etc. It's that mysterious alien presence, which starts interfering with Binkis, the neandertals, and Teesa's Cloud Mountain People, that will eventually kick start the plot.

Binkis has crash-landed with a shuttle in a remote part of the Venusian outback. A joint American-Soviet expedition heads off to find him, with our main American/Brit/~~French~~ characters and Binkis's wife aboard an airship. They also crash (there's a cool, if unlikely, attack by giant pterosaurs) fight some neandertals who have scavenged Soviet AK-47s and are being led by Binkis/holding him hostage, meet Teesa's people and form an alliance with them. Marc, who has been mooning over Cynthia the whole book, gives up on her and starts chasing after blonde space princess Teesa. Teesa is painful to read. She's a classic Planetary Romance/Jungle Girl character, prone to saying things like this:

"Who are you, warrior, that you walk my dreams and hurl thunder?" she asked. "You are not the one who now leads the beastmen against us – you are his enemy, is that not so?"

And yes, she does wear a fur bikini. Everyone changes into fur bikinis and/or briefs for the finale, which involves a dinosaur-mounted attack by our heroes on an army of AK-toting neandertals, and a confrontation with the computer that the mysterious aliens left behind to run the Venus terraforming project.

The Sky People isn't bad in any particular way. As I said, Stirling doesn't advertise it as a transcendent novel or a reinvention of old tropes. This book is built out of the solid, old tropes of Burroughs and Heinlein, renovated a bit with better science. But it could have been so much more.

Just look at Our Hero. Burroughs and Heinlein and a hundred other authors sent white, male, handsome, competent, American heroes zipping off to Venus for half a century. In Stirling's update, we get exactly the same guy. Just imagine if he'd made Cynthia the protagonist, instead of what feels increasingly like the obligatory minority/female sub-hero. That alone would have been an interesting change. (Some of the Venusians keep slaves, and the Americans do not interfere. It's quickly forgotten, and barely mentioned by our descended-from-slaves character.)

It's useless, really, to talk about the book you'd wished to read. The book I read was okay: competent adventure, dinosaurs in space, exactly as advertised. It just makes me worry that we aren't moving forward at all in a lot of areas of SF. This book is like the softer side of RaceFail: it's not overtly racist by any means, and Cynthia isn't treated as a moron or incompetent. It just puts white males in the top spot, with everyone else holding down the supporting roles.

There are a lot of books out there now like The Sky People, which look backward to SF's roots, failing to innovate in plot, or character, or writing style. They thrive on nostalgia and the frisson readers get when that nostalgia is given a modern update. Frankly, I don't need to read any more of that.

Annointed by who exactly?

2009-03-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

Warning: many, many spoilers.

Kings' two-hour premiere was a retelling of the Biblical story of Samuel, Saul and David. The most interesting thing about the big-budget kick off was how it deviated from the story, and how it deliberately tried to piss off some of its potential core audience.

If you look at the pilot as nothing more than two hours of television, it was fairly solid, but not without flaws. The opening hour was quite strong, introducing the quasi-New York city of Shiloh, capital of Gilboa. Gilboa was unified from three warring states by its current king Silas Benjamin, played by Ian "Awesome" McShane, also known as Al Fuckin' Swearengen. (He's been renamed from Saul for no reason I can discern.) He's surrounded by a group of advisors that includes enough solid character actors to guarantee some good sub-West Wing level political intrigue. (In truth, it was nice to see a political setting where the characters are supposed to be flawed and tyrannical. Unlike on Battlestar Galatica, there's no attempt to pretend that the leaders are democratic.) If anything carries this show, it'll be McShane. He's the best actor in the bunch, with the most complicated character.

Not too long into the program and we meet David Shepherd, youngest of seven sons, auto mechanic, ~~all American~~ all Gilboan boy. In other words, he is boring. While the rest of his family is watching the dedication of a rebuilt Shiloh as the new capital, David has to mind the family auto shop business, and repairs the car of Reverend Samuels. Samuels significantly gives David a broken watch with the kingdom's butterfly symbol on the back, and touches David on the forehead with one thumb. Which would be creepy if it didn't have deep religious significance. No, wait, it's still kind of creepy.

Jump ahead two years and David's joined the army to fight the neighbourhing nation of Gath, which has a whole lot of tanks called Goliaths. After some soldiers are captured and taken prisoner, David sneaks out at night, rescues the two hostages, and blows up a couple of Goliaths for good measure. He has, of course, rescued the king's son Jack. David becomes a hero, is feted in the capital, is promoted, meets the king, his daughter and our other principal characters. Machinations ensue, and there's a sub-plot about a lost cell phone, and Jack possibly being court martialed, and David dances with and smooches the princess. The war with Gath ends, starts again, and finally ends again when David histrionically walks onto the battlefield carrying sheets soaked in his just-deceased brother's blood, calling for peace and brotherhood and blah blah blah.

At the closer, Silas is facing rebellion from within, because his nasty corporate brother in law wants the war to continue, so he can keep making profits (he runs Crossgen, which I assume is intended to be a Haliburton analogue). The brother in law also plots with Jack for a generational coup. Meanwhile, Silas is pissed when he's told by Samuels that he's lost the favour of God, and sees butterflys landing on David's head as a living crown – exactly the sign that showed Silas was to be king years before.

The story, as a story, mostly works. There are a few false notes.

The battle scenes are dreadful, filmed on the cheap and without a hint of the realism that pretty much every audience expects post-Band of Brothers. The rows of Goliath tanks just sit there, a few hundred yards from the Gilboan lines. Even I know that's stupid. Can't you just smash them all to bits with bombs or artillery if they're nicely lined up for you like that?

The romance between David and Silas's daughter was reasonably done well for such an obvious hook, but her role as an earnest would-be health care reformer is dull. Jack is much more interesting. He's a deeply closeted gay man, a soldier and a leader who acts like spoiled Eurotrash when he's off the battlefield. One of the best scenes (in which Ian McShane gets to display his trademark awesomeness) has Silas confront his son: he knows Jack is gay, and he doesn't care. But he does demand that Jack hide it, crush it out of his life, or he'll never be king. It's in many ways just as savage as if Silas had been painted as an out and out homophobe. He's consumed with the need for power, and he expects his son to destroy everything that matters to him in pursuit of the same goal. There's also more than a little textual support in the Bible for a gay relationship between David and Saul's son Jonathan. Though I doubt the show will go that direction.

One of the worst moments is when David breaks down and tells his dying brother that he's a coward. First, it's a cliche and second, it's obviously not true. Surrendering to overwhelming force is not cowardice (he was facing two tanks alone and in no man's land) especially when you've just finished a solo rescue mission. The supposed cowardice and David's role as a peacemaker is also at odds with the Bible, in which David is a warrior who rises to prominence by wiping out the Israelites' enemies, not by making speeches to them. Legitimate update, or boring and preachy? So far the execution suggests the latter.

Still, there's enough decent writing and strong acting to keep me watching for at least another episode. Whether the show will appeal to its potential core audience is another question.

Biblical epics and retellings have always worked well in America, which is freakishly churchgoing compared to every other wealthy western country. Religious TV programming, including as Touched by an Angel, Joan of Arcadia and 7th Heaven, has been successful in recent years. I can't imagine a program that mixes elements from each benefits from poking the religious right in the eye with a speech endorsing evolution (delivered by Silas apropos of a chicken-or-egg question over breakfast). Maybe the producers intend to appeal to religious moderates only.

Evolution aside, there's a big difference between showing bad behaviour in Kings and bad behaviour in a modern Christian family. Hollywood has waffled between cloying depictions of Christian families (see the deeply disturbing 7th Heaven) and attacks. The Book of Daniel was not so much a poke in the eye as a kick to the groin of the religious right wing. It was also painfully obvious that it was intended as such, so that between the religion and the attacks on same, it wasn't any fun to watch for a poor old atheist.

What Kings has going for it is that murder, adultery, warfare and backstabbing here are rooted in the original text. The Book of Daniel or Joan of Arcadia had fluffy, loving, hippy-style Jesus and God interactions. The Old Testament, as a source, has more dramatic potential. It has wrath and killing and lust and vengeance.

Which makes for better TV.

"I prefer man-reaction"

2009-03-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

You know, I don't have a lot of time to sit around and watch TV. I've got a stack of library books I could be reading. I'm getting the complete collection of Yes, Minister on DVD from the library. I'm twitching from worrying about possible future unemployment (like we all are). So I don't watch a lot of pretty good TV. It's got to be great or so godawful it's funny.

So Dollhouse had another pretty good episode last night. I'm just waiting for great to kick in.

The actual episode, True Believer, has ~~Faith~~ Echo being blinded and turned into a religious fanatic named Esther (seriously, aren't there any religious fanatics named Britney or Tiffany?) so she could be a human camera for the ATF. Echo infiltrates cult with ease, and practically trips over all the guns they've got stockpiled there. So the ATF decides to barge in before Boyd can safely extract her, and complications ensue. Echo/Esther Meanwhile, Victor has a thing for Sierra, and we get yet more evidence that the whole brain-wipe thing is not quite as effective as Topher claims. At the end of the episode, we get the now-obligatory hint that Echo is remembering things from her engagements.

And that's the real problem with this episode. It's at least the third or fourth time we've had this hint. And while that's entertaining for an episode or two, waiting for the payoff is getting more frustrating. I don't know if the fault is in the writers room or with the Fox executives meddling, but I need this show to start moving forward right away. Echo needs to wake up. Sierra and Victor, too. They need to become real characters. Because the one-off episode plots are only fair to middling. They're executed better than average, but I've seen heists, and hostage rescues, and bodyguarding pop stars, and the most dangerous game, and I've definitely seen cults before. A lot. Those fairly mundane plots are not what this show could be good at. This show can be about paranoia and identity on a really, really weird and awesome level.

Whedon's made it deliberately harder for himself in some ways with Dollhouse. With all three of his previous series, he built a core group of likeable, funny characters who acted as a family unit. Even a bad one-off episode from Buffy or Angel is watchable because of the humour and character moments, not to mention the ongoing plots. But with Dollhouse, the plot demands a group of people who are somewhat alienated from one another. The dolls are being forcibly denied that kind of bonding (although they're trying, like bison). The rest of the characters are functionally villains or outsiders. Whedon's definitely trying something different, something less viewer-friendly than his previous outings, and it's always good to see a creator stretching himself. Because the alternative would be repetition and boredom.

So, it's been five episodes. Which calls to mind the Five Ep Rule I instituted after episode two, ie, you should give every show by a respected creator at least five episodes to get off the ground.

So the judgement is, this show has a shitload of potential. But so far, that's about all it has. And that potential will keep me watching for a while longer. Hey, it's still better written than the average action/SF show that does plots like this. (Have you tried to watch Knight Rider? It's like gargling with broken glass and hydrochloric acid.) I love that this is an SF story about neurology and identity. I don't love that it's going nowhere fast right now.

If it dies right now, Dollhouse will be the least among Joss Whedon's TV shows. If it gets moving in some direction, it could be better than Buffy or Angel.

A backhanded compliment

2009-03-13T14:07:00.001-07:00

I'm sure this will be in next month's Ansible, but I squirmed when I read one of the comments in this NY Times piece on the sale of Audry Niffeneger's forthcoming second novel.

Joe Regal, Ms. Niffenegger’s agent, said: “There are going to be people coming to the book with claws out. That’s just reality. It’s for reasons completely unconnected to the book.” He added that even “The Time Traveler’s Wife” faced naysayers. “There were lots of people who dismissed the first book because it sounded like romance or science fiction or said because it sold so well, it can’t be good,” Mr. Regal said.

Aaarrrggghhhh...

Goddammit, The Time Traveler's Wife was SF, and it was a romance, and both were done well and thoroughly intertwined with the characters. Remove the love story, and you're left with the clinical details of a man whose disability is that he travels randomly in time. Remove the time travel and it's a boring and predictable tale of two clever young things in the city. But together, the elements of a tragedy come together. It's damn good, which has nothing to do with what genre it falls into.

Gaeta was so goddamn right!

2009-03-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

Because some arguments should be done with stick figures.

I'm so gonna put this thing on a T-shirt in time for this fall's VCon.

Gaeta was right

2009-03-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Just watched the wrap up to the Gaeta Mutiny story arc on Battlestar Galactica, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, he lost and got gunned down.

My main problem with the whole scenario has been summed up better than I ever could over at Asking the Wrong Questions. Here's the relevant portion, in which she first floats the idea of a USA-Al Qaeda alliance.

Or, you know what, that's not bad enough. Imagine that the people in question are members of the SS Einsatzgruppen, the ones who used to walk into Eastern European villages, march the local Jews to a freshly dug pit, and start firing. Imagine that the citizenship they were demanding was Israeli. How would you feel if your government decided to acquiesce to such a demand? Appalled? Offended? Like you wanted to take to the streets, and vote the people who supported this decision out of office?

Neither of these scenarios even approach the awfulness of the proposition that sparks the recently concluded mutiny arc on Battlestar Galactica, because neither the Holocaust, which the series has never attempted to recall, nor 9/11, which it recalls constantly, approach the awfulness of what happens in its opening episodes.

So, Gaeta was right. And at least the writers let him die with some dignity. But I'm not sure if he was meant to be morally ambiguous. It seems to me that, compared to Adama, he's an out-and-out hero. (Zarek, not so much.)

All Adama's frothing (which inspired some seriously bad scenery chewing by Olmos) about traitors and loyalty and blah blah blah just serve to remind careful viewers that Adama has a long history of betrayal. He led a military coup, he ignores civilian rule whenever it suits his purpose, and right before the mutiny, three of the most powerful people in the fleet were him, his son, and his girlfriend. He's at the centre of an incestuous knot of power that's crushed all opposition, from rival political factions to striking workers. His first answer to everything is force. He's Robert fuckin' Mugabe. He's the Greek colonels. He's every righteous-sounding military strongman in history. And the writers don't seem to have noticed this.

Writers have asked us to root for the bad guy before, from Richard III to Al Swearengen, but Ron Moore's not giving us a lot of overt cues that he actually considers Adama bad. All the other main characters line up behind him.

One final, unrelated note: in my experience, people with prosthetic legs do not cut off one leg of their pants short so you can see the special effect at all times.

Racefail 2009

2009-03-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

About which you can read more here, here, here, or even here.

As I understand it, (and I only heard about it two days ago on Torque Control and Whatever, linked above) the whole thing started off with a post by Elizabeth Bear on how to write "the Other," whether other races, genders, sexual orientations, etc. I've since read the original post, and it was an honest attempt to grapple with the question. More of a public mini-essay than any attempt to be definitive about it. Somewhere in the comments thread, things got a bit snippy. There were posts in response. It turned into a general discussion of people of colour in SF/Fantasy fiction in general, and within fandom as well. Then there were open letters, and more posts, and things got ugly. About which ugliness, see Scalzi's blog. Someone tried to use one of his comment threads to out an anonymous blogger's identity. And there'd been no discussion about the debate on Whatever about the topic, which had been confined almost entirely to LiveJournal, and flying under a lot of folks' radar.

The only thing I have to add to the whole mess is that it seems like it's the progressive end of the SF/Fantasy blogosphere that's tearing itself to shreds. I wandered over to John Ringo's site earlier today, he of Oh John Ringo No fame. Anything going on there? No, all's quiet in his forums. Now, if there's anyone who could benefit from a little consciousness raising in SF, you'd think it would be him. Go on, click that link. It's a review of Watch on the Rhine, a John Ringo collaboration in which rejuvenated Waffen SS soldiers save the Earth from an alien horde. 'Cause they're just misunderstood good guys.

Really.

And Racefail started because a writer was trying to talk about how she goes through the process of trying to get characters from another background right, about how she tries to make them real and whole characters. And among the mess of screeching (which I do not have the patience to entirely sort through) I've found some good posts by pros and fans about those issues, and about race and gender in SF in general.

SF does contain overt, and unconscious, racism. John Ringo's bizarro novel was just the first one that popped into my head, and I used it here as an example, not to encourage anyone to extend the messy discussion to his place. But the people savaging one another in this thing? I'm thinking 99 percent of them are not part of the problem. The people who are, aren't even aware that it's going on.

ETA: cleaned up some of my messy sentence construction Wednesday at noon. It is better to write when wide awake.

Writing your way out of your own mythology

2009-03-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

This week, my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) and I are going to sit down and watch about four or five episodes of Battlestar Galactica back to back. We have the bare minimum cable package, and here in western Canada, that does not include anybody broadcasting BSG.

We've had the tapes for a week now, and we haven't exactly been in a rush to finish them off, despite being in the middle of the Gaeta Mutiny. (I like Alessandro Juliani better in live theatre. We referred to him as Romeo for the first season, because we've seen him do plenty of Shakespeare in Vancouver over the years.)

My love for BSG, in full flower after the mini series and the first season, has now withered and could blow away in a strong wind. I just don't have any confidence that there's a mythology there that's going to make sense.

The whole term mythology or mytharc started showing up a lot when The X-Files was ramping up. I watched that series from the get go. Then, around season seven, I just stopped. I've never seen the finale. I don't care. There was no way to fix what was wrong, not in two hours, not in two years worth of episodes.

The field of science fiction and fantasy TV is littered with series that showed early promise and then crashed and burned under the weight of their own myth building, and their creators total inability to untie the knotted plot threads.

The X-Files is the template for all these shows, for good and ill. It was fairly innovative in its day for attempting to create a serialized show out of a cop/supernatural format. Almost every other cop show of the day relied on one-off episodes, as did most SF shows of the 1980s and early '90s, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and the remake of The Twilight Zone. Continuity was for soaps and teen dramas.

When The X-Files hit it big, almost every copycat show attempted to follow its paradigm of mixing one-offs with mytharc elements. Just from Fox in the 1990s, I remember Strange Luck and VR.5, the latter a show so terrible I would saw open my own skull and pour in lye rather than watch it again. Anthony Stewart Head notwithstanding.

The serialization started to become more and more prevalent, not just on SF shows, but on a lot of the programs on HBO. Check out Deadwood, The Wire, or The Sopranos. A new generation of SF shows dove even further into serialization. The later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer don't make sense at all if you haven't been paying close attention for about five or six years.

The problem isn't the serialized format; I love a good ongoing story. It's that too many SF showrunners learned how to do it from Chris Carter, and not enough from J. Michael Straczynski or Joss Whedon. (Say what you will about his dialogue, Stracznyski knew how to plan.)

You can almost always tell whether there's a plan within the first half dozen episodes of a program. Any one problem won't kill a show, but if you pile them one on top of the other, things get problematic fast. Bad signs include:

• Deliberate withholding of information from the audience and characters. My girlfriend pointed out that in The X-Files, Mulder and Scully usually knew exactly as much as the audience. At best, audiences saw a tiny glimpse behind the curtain – they'd see Cancer Man popping some evidence away in a vault, or conferring with some other suits. Compare to Lost, in which we are constantly confronted with A) characters seeing something and reacting with shock, while the audience is in the dark or B) the audience sees something that's supposedly significant, but none of the nine hundred or so main characters knows about it. (I know, they're trying to create tension, but the technique only works if used sparingly.) The tendency to withhold information is linked to

• Deeply incurious protagonists. At least Mulder and Scully were always trying to figure things out. I watched the first season of Carnivale in open disgust of the protagonist, who was constantly being approached by people who wanted to explain his powers and the quasi-Biblical weirdness that surrounded him. And he'd run away, fingers in his ears shouting "La la la la, I can't hear you!" As a viewer I feel like I've been slapped in the face when a character openly refuses information. At that point, the writers are just being dicks. Compare this to BSG (both were headed by Ron Moore) in which it seems like no one is asking the Cylons a lot of pertient questions. How did they know about the Final Five? Who created their religion? How are they different from normal humans, anyway? (These may have been answered by now, I'll know when I check the tapes. But I doubt it, and the questions should have been asked much, much earlier in any case.)

• Dropped plot threads. This is Lost's favourite trick. Go on, start to count up all the plots and hints that have just fallen by the wayside. Smoke monsters, slave ships, four-toed statues, a second island, immortal guys, baby-killing diseases, voices in the forest. And where did all the wild boars go, anyway? If there isn't a coherent plan, dropped plot threads will strangle a show, like they did the X-Files. I'm sure somewhere there's a fan with a giant wall chart that explains all the conspiracies and aliens in Chris Carter's first show, but it's all fanwanking. You cannot reconcile all the alien species, from greys to black goo to clones to baseball players to transgendered Amish sex vampires.

• Constantly revolving cast. How many main characters does Lost have? Outside of the fairly large core of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Hurley, Jin and Sun, and Locke, there have been at least two dozen significant characters, all with their own backstories and motivations. Most of them are dead, while others have been pushed to the side. Some show creators eventually get bored with their core cast and their stories, so they add new people. Lots and lots and lots of them. Often they replace the main characters, or some of them, expecting fans to go along with it. It almost never works. Ask poor Robert Patrick.

• Expanding universe. This afflicted The X-Files to a certain extent, but also Lost and even Buffy and Angel. The show starts out with a simple concept: girl kills vampires; FBI agents investigate a hidden world of conspiracies and aliens; plane crashes on mysterious island. Then more and more and more elements are added, until the original plot thread is in danger of being forgotten. Which leads us to

• No ending. How was The X-Files supposed to end? With Mulder and Scully blowing the lid off all the conspiracies and revealing aliens to the world? And Lost? Half the main cast has already escaped from the island. What's the central premise of the show now? Where's it going? I don't believe that The X-Files was ever meant to have an ending, a finale that would wrap it all up. But the fans were certainly expecting one. Everyone expects an ending to a narrative, a wrap up linked to the central premise, and being left hanging leaves the viewers feeling cheated. Again, look to Straczynski, who introduced the Vorlons and Shadows in the first season of Babylon 5. A more obscure example may be the werewolf/murder mystery show Wolf Lake. It was cancelled pretty quickly (not without cause, the writing was wildly uneven, from great to dreadful) but you got the sense that at the end of the first season, we'd at least know who had killed the town patriarch. There was an end goal in sight. Buffy's last episode wrapped up the central concept that was first mentioned in the opening of the first episode: that there was a chosen one. Joss Whedon wrapped up the show by changing the rules.

So it's possible that BSG has an ending planned, and it may even answer many of my questions. It's far from the worst offender when it comes to meandering plots (I'm looking at you, Lost). But I've seen far, far too many shows crushed under their own mythology, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next decade produces a few more.

No such thing as a blank slate

2009-03-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

Well, that was a pretty good episode. Last week's Dollhouse, with the stalker fan and the pop star, was burdened with a forgettable plot. This week's episode, "Gray Hour" (yeah, spoilers) went with a much more interesting heist story. What can I say, I'm a sucker for heist plots anyway.

Most notably, this episode felt like it was balanced well between the competing strands of narrative, character and central premise that supports the show. We got a good one-off episode, with double crosses and the traditional screw ups that accompany any heist plot. We got back story seamlessly interwoven into that plot, with Topher and DeWitt having their little chat about Alpha, and DeWitt's boss making a phone appearance. We got the SFnal side, with Alpha remotely wiping Echo, and with Taffy being replicated across two dolls to try and clean up the mess. And we finally got to see Echo developing as a character.

That last was always the big concern – how would we ever care about someone who's different every week? But this episode's main arc began and ended with the focus on Echo, not a persona. They may wipe her memories (seemingly imperfectly) and they may program her, but there's something under there all the same. Echo sits with the same people every day. Echo wants to be better, to do well, and shows some strength and judgement when trapped in the vault. All the wipes are doing, maybe, is holding Echo back from becoming a real personality of her own.

I can't help but wonder where this could go if the show gets a long enough run. If Echo becomes a fully realized person, can she ever re-integrate with Caroline, her original personality? Or would recreating Caroline (presumably stored somewhere on one of Topher's cassettes) wipe out Echo? And would Echo allow that?

My only complaint with this hour of TV: How the hell did Echo and the injured techie get out the back door? I watched my tape again this morning, and I can't figure it out. If they could go out the back way, why didn't they do it earlier? That's a fairly important plot thread that got dropped there.

The (non)story of the end of the world

2009-03-04T07:32:00.001-08:00

You can't accuse Bruce Sterling of shying away from the consequences of his ideas. He hasn't really ever written what you'd call a happy ending into any of his novels (I've not read The Zenith Angle, so perhaps it ends with the main characters frolicking with puppies, but I doubt it.) Holy Fire ended with the main character finding some peace, I suppose, but also terribly estranged from humanity. Heavy Weather killed off the bad guys, but left the plains states devastated by the world's largest supertornado. Islands in the Net saw the protagonist kept hostage for years, her husband married off to her best friend. Distraction, in some ways my favourite of Sterling's novels, also left its main characters damaged by experimental neurological treatments and floundering after having waged months of cynical political battles.

Sterling seems to often write about the utter randomness of the universe. Justice, for him, is not something that occurs naturally to neatly wrap up a story.

The Caryatids, his latest novel, doesn't even wrap up at all, really. Not only does it not tie up any of its three major strands, it doesn't even let us know if the world is saved. Or if anyone can save it.

The titular caryatids are four clone-sisters, Vera, Radmilla, Sonja, and Biserka. The first three each take a turn narrating the novel, which concerns efforts to recover from a global environmental catastrophe. Global warming is the chief, but not the only, cause of the mess. The collapse has seen millions die, and wiped out most of the world's old nation states. (It's implied, but not stated, that they've been largely replaced by smaller local governments, so it's not exactly a libertarian or anarchist wet dream.) While China survives as the last and most totalitarian of the world's governments, the other two big powers are what we'd call non-governmental organizations. The Dispensation are glamour-obsessed capitalists, trying to charm and buy their way out of environmental apocalypse. The Acquis are earnest quasi-socialist greens - all about hard work, sacrifice, and mind-blowingly weird technological fixes. China, too, is trying to save the world, or at least it's corner. Each of the narrating clone sisters is affiliated with one of the three factions, giving us a tour of their respective world views.

That's about it for the novel, actually. It's a tour of the world, and a lightly sketched one with little backstory. We never find out how the Acquis or Dispensation were founded, or what happened to the old nation states, or even why, exactly, the four (formerly seven) clones were created. There was some grand plan about them saving or conquering the world using ubiquitous sensor systems, but it seems to have collapsed before they even grew to adulthood. Those sensor systems give us a Sterling neologism: everyware. Despite the lack of back story, the technology and world building, the evocation of a damaged world, are the book's strongest suits.

When it comes to characters, I wish I could say I liked anyone in this book. Vera, the Acquis cadre who narrates the first section, comes closest to being a likeable character. But like all the clones she's deeply emotionally wounded, prone to crying and outbursts, and seemingly incapable of doing anything to save herself. Sterling's characters have been growing more and more depressing since Heavy Weather. Some sequences are like being stuck in an elevator with a depressed person. After a while, you just want to slap them and tell them to crack a smile, dammit. The clones don't have much of a sense of humour.

Yet they're surrounded by madness that should make you laugh. Radmila distracts the proles by dancing on top of a giant Martian tripod-style robot that smashes quake damaged L.A. buildings so the Dispensation can start rebuilding. The entire Dispensation seems to be run by half-witted celebrities, a clan of Ronald Reagans and Britney Spearses that has propagated itself, each one making the expected metamorphosis from actor to politician. Sonja marries a young Gobi-desert bandit who's name translates as Lucky. Vera even manages a bit of slapstick screwing up in the first chapter, although she's very serious about it, of course. As is everyone else. It's not just clones who don't laugh.

The novel also comes to a crashing halt in the early part of the China segment, as Sterling infodumps a lecture about what happened to China. He also goes on an extended rant about how heroes packing guns never save the world, how it's only saved by serious management, about getting people together and making them work towards a common, sane goal. Then Sonja and her husband strap on guns and go looking for trouble.

So what does it all come to? I really wish I knew. There is deliberate craft in its non-ending – it isn't that Sterling simply ran out of steam. He wanted it to end this way. Loose ends lash about madly, just like in real life. In that sense, despite the exoskeletons and giant robots and attacks of the clones (and yes, there is an attack by clones, using robots) it's the most realistic SF novel to come along in a while. It suggests that we not only face catastrophe of our own making, but that the natural catastrophes of the universe aren't going to give us a break either.

When Anathem came out last year, a lot of reviews noted that it was the most Stephensonian of Neal Stephenson's books. The Caryatids is in the same boat. If you like Sterling – if you like people declaiming to one another, with italics, if you like wild yet eerily plausible near-future speculation, if you like clones and robots and weird politics and oblique satire – you'll enjoy it.

Get your squid hats ready

2009-03-02T07:32:00.000-08:00

Margaret Atwood has a new novel coming out soon, The Year of the Flood. It is, of course, not science fiction. From Amazon:

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops - has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren's one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue.

I liked The Handmaid's Tale, and it certainly needs no additional defense from me among science fiction fans. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Governor General's Award, was shortlisted for a Nebula, a Booker, and a Prometheus Award (an odd collection of awards and nominations if ever there was one).

Handmaid's Tale belongs in the great pantheon of dystopian novels of warning, and Atwood's second proper SF novel (we're not counting The Blind Assassin for these purposes) left me decidedly cold. I never got past the first few chapters of Oryx and Crake, and it was not well treated by SF reviewers.

This new book, from a rather short description, looks to have replicated many of the things that are wrong with Oryx and Crake. Atwood's prose is often sublime, but when she turns to post-apocalyptic satire, her use of ham-fisted neologisms is painful.

So I probably won't be reading it, unless the reviews are much, much better than I expect. Instead, I'll probably go read her last book from the Massey Lecture series, Payback. Written just before the current economic upheaval, a book about debt and indebtedness looks like a pretty good warning of dystopia about now.

Why I hate Chapters

2009-02-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

I went to Canada's big box bookstore chain on Wednesday, in search of The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling's first new novel in years, and arguably his first proper SF novel in more than a decade.

Couldn't find it. Not on the shelf. Not on the ludicrously misnamed New and Hot in Science Fiction table. Not in non-genre fiction.

I ask a clerk. Bruce Sterling? Never heard of him (of course). We look it up on the computer.

Ah, they do have it in store. Three whole copies. Have I looked on the shelf? Yes. Have I looked on the New and Hot in Science Fiction table? Yes.

Two clerks later, we determine it is actually still in the back of the store. Judging by the lack of a big fat hole on the S shelf of the SF section, it has never actually been shelved. Because Bruce Sterling is not on the A list.

Sterling is one of the fathers of cyberpunk. He has been producing genre defining, award winning, best selling and well reviewed SF since the late 1970s. None of this matters to non-SF fans, and I don't expect it to. Sterling isn't in the public consciousness the way William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, or even Philip K. Dick are. For mass market purposes, he's a B lister. One of the top of the B listers, one with a devoted fan base all his own, stoked by his work as a futurist, WIRED blogger and general weirdo. But none of this matters to a big box book store. If he's not going to shift an entire crate of product in his first week, if he's not Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling or Stephenson, who cares? The books will get on the shelf when they get there. I imagine fans of any genre author, or even some good non-genre authors, have had similar frustrations trying to get a new book in their hands.

This is why Chapters will die. The only thing they can do better than Amazon is get books out there as physical objects, where you can see them and grab them up on impulse. And they can't even do that right.

Chapters, and its American big box bookstore cousins, are based on volume. I remember when I first went to a big box bookstore as a teenager. Not just a few shelves of SF books, but shelf after shelf after shelf. Books I'd only ever heard of on Prisoners of Gravity. It was nerdvana. (And who were they competing with? It was not, in my neck of the woods, with small mom and pop bookstores, or even with specialty stores, because the wastelands of suburbia contain neither of these things. It was with chains of shopping mall bookstores. Like Black Bond. So one chain out competes another. Who cares, if we get more book selection?)

Chapters has been beaten at its own game by Amazon. Everyone knows this already, of course, but the "where's my Bruce Sterling book" incident shows why. Obviously, Amazon has more books, and it's almost never out of stock of anything. This is not because Amazon is more virtuous or has a deeper respect for books or authors or readers than Chapters. Amazon does not care about my desires, any more than Chapters does. It's just set up to fulfil my desires anyway. It might not have one person on staff who gives a crap about SF either, but it's happy little filing system will let me locate the book, read the reviews, give me recommendations for other books, and even ship it to me for free if I buy a large enough volume of stuff.

The Chapters in my home town was still plenty busy around Christmas and during the Boxing Day sales. But it's basically dead walking. I wonder what we'll do with all the parking lots and the giant shells of bookstores when the last person without an internet connection dies?

New twists, old themes

2009-02-28T08:16:00.000-08:00

Spoilers, if you're taping Dollhouse.

So, I enjoyed the Feb. 27 episode of Dollhouse, but I'm wondering if we're going to get an old plot served up for every show.

Protecting the starlet from the obsessed fan is not exactly new. Even the fan who wants to die at the hands of said fan has been done before – the one that comes to mind is in John Varley's excellent novel Steel Beach.

That said, there was a return of snappy dialogue, a couple of nice mini-twists, and the growing sense, verbalized this time by the Dollhouse masters, that Echo is developing a personality. And that personal growth is what led to serial slasher Alpha.

In other Dollhouse news, the frenzy of worship for the show and the backlash against are both reaching insane fanboy levels normally only possible when discussing who's more badass, Boba Fett or Wolverine?

Check out this interview question to Stephen DeKnight from io9, following the broadcast of the second episode.

Are you stoked that everybody's singling out your episode as one of the series' best, with the bow-hunting and the most dangerous gaming?

Okaaaaay...

On the other hand, there's this little commentary from the Penny Arcade guys. I admit, the cartoon was pretty funny, but keep in mind that this was also written after seeing two episodes of the show. If that.

New rule: if a respected creator of one of your favourite shows (Deadwood, Veronica Mars, The Wire, Buffy) has a new program out, you give it five episodes. You don't praise it unduly before that, you don't dismiss it as garbage. Individual episodes may be bad or good, but you give it a chance. It's the Five Ep Rule. Respect it.

Seriously, go back and watch the actual pilot of Buffy. Watch it and try to imagine you've never seen another episode. High concept, but how high a rating would you give it out of ten? (Me, I'm thinking seven. Six is possible, for having a happy ending after Xander just staked his alleged friend Jesse.) Television is a serial medium. You don't rate a show based on any one episode, or even two or three.

Also note that this is probably a moot discussion. Fox's decision to tie Dollhouse to the anthill that is the Friday night time slot means we're probably just previewing the show to see if we'll want to buy Dollhouse: The Complete Series next Christmas.

Slap your editor, Harry

2009-02-27T07:45:00.001-08:00

I came home from the library the other day with two books featuring mammoths on the cover. One was The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove. (This is the other one, in case you were wondering.) Obviously, everthing goes better with extinct megafauna. I tore through most of my non-fiction selection, then got down to reading Turtledove's work.

Now, I didn't have a lot of preconceptions about Turtledove. I've never read any of his Guns of the South books, because... well, I just don't give a crap about the subject matter. I was born and raised and still live in Canada. So I don't have that American gene that makes people obsessed with the (US) Civil War. When I read some 19th Century alternate history, I'm more likely to go for something with Mounties in it (disclaimer: by a friend of mine).

But this looked like something more in my line. I'm sick of fantasy novels that just use Generic Medieval Europe + Magic + Elves. Anything with an Ice Age setting gets my attention.

Unfortunately, The Breath of God contains a few glaringly ugly sentences right up front. Check out page eight.

"Life is full of surprises," Ulrik Skakki said, which would have been funny if only it were funny.

And

They not only herded wooly mammoths, as the Bizogots had for centuries uncounted, but rode them to war, with lancers and men with long, long lances on the beasts' shaggy backs.

Seriously? If lancers aren't men with lances, then what are they?

I read another ten pages from that point, far enough to determine that those weird, awkward phrasings on page eight seem to be anomalies. But Turtledove and his editor ought to have taken a harder look at that section. Ouch.

Dark symmetries

2009-02-25T07:23:00.000-08:00

An interesting article on Clarkesworld this month about a piece of SF that isn't often published or read as such. Robert N. Lee tells us about "The Most Important Genre Novel You'll Never Read."

He's right. I'm not going out of my way to read The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, anytime soon. Ever since it was raised to true notoriety along with Timothy McVeigh and his madness, I've seen it mentioned off-handedly as a novel about a future race war.

It's far worse than that, as Lee tells us. It's the diary of a member of a far-right white supremacist organization which launches the ethnic cleansing of the United States, and then the world. Along the way, they slaughter every white woman who's ever slept with a man of another colour, and start a nuclear war. It sounds like something written from a perspective of self-devouring hate, the kind that leaves something hollow and vile, at the far end of human. Lee does nothing to dissuade readers from this view

I recommend Turner because it's poisonous. I don't envy anyone who reads it without building up tolerance to the darker ends of genre fiction and to work written by people who hate you personally and want you dead. This book should hurt going down — if it doesn't, you shouldn't read it. It's worth the pain, though, and more to the point, provides an opportunity that should hit us all hard in the center of our eternal eleven-year-olds: saving the world from evil, no shit.

This book is the Necronomicon. The Turner Diaries is bound in human skin, written in blood and contains demons — real ones, not Biblical bogeys. We've all witnessed the power of these monsters. This is the real deal from all those horror stories: the book of secret dark knowledge, access restricted to its devoted worshippers yet hidden in plain sight, awaiting the one who can best harness or defeat its pure evil.

What struck me was that the framing structure of the story seemed familiar.

It's the diary of a member of a "persecuted minority" in the near future, with the document itself supposedly having been discovered and published in the farther future.

That's identical to the framing structure of The Handmaid's Tale.

Notably, they're both dystopian novels (although readers of The Turner Diaries might not consider it dystopian to slaughter 95 per cent of the world's population), they both concern a resistance to the established order, and they both end with the main character taken off the stage. Turner himself dies a suicide nuclear bomber (of course) destroying Washington D.C. (of course) whereas Offred simply takes a chance at escape and vanishes from her own narrative. Given the world she's escaping through, her end is not likely a happy one. Lastly, many people wouldn't consider either book to be proper SF, whatever that is. Atwood has been famously defending herself against the charge of writing SF ever since Handmaid's Tale was published.

I don't mean to say here that there are any similarities in philosophy, ideology, or quality between the two books. Indeed, you'd have to wander far and wide to find two books generated from such opposite ends of those spectra. Atwood's work is genuinely art, and my only complaint about the text is that sometimes it feels like Atwood-the-poet overrides Atwood-the-novelist. The book is, in fact, sometimes too well written, and the finely crafted metaphors can kick you right out of the grim reality of Gilead.

My hypothesis is that the structural similarities are a matter of parallel literary evolution. Both Pierce and Atwood needed to tell a particular kind of tale, and they found the discovered diary, which is one of the oldest frame stories for fantastic tales, to be the best format. Because it goes back as far as Gulliver's Travels, it has a certain respectability lacking to the full immersion approach that SF has championed for its readers. The frame story offers a way for non-SF readers - the target market for both books - to be eased into a strange world. All political fiction is propaganda, and none more so than dystopian and utopian novels. Artful or wretchedly written, vile or virtuous, the propagandist has to connect with their audience.

I just hope more copies of The Handmaid's Tale are selling this year than The Turner Diaries.

Science fiction, meet elves

2009-02-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear is an odd hybrid of a book. I first heard of it on Scalzi's blog, and I'm halfway through it now.

It's good, at least so far. It's the tale of Muire, last of the valkyries (or, by the text's tongue-mangling spelling, the waelcyrge) aka the Children of Light. In the opening chapters, the world ends, as the Children of Light face off against evil wolf things and their own wayward kin, in something that's near enough to Ragnarok. Only Muire, a steed called Kasimir, and one traitor and evildoer, the Grey Wolf, are left alive.

Then the story jumps 2,300 years in the future. The world's ending again.

That's a hell of a hook for any story. The story is most notable so far for mixing pulp SF, Lovecraft, Wagnerian pseudo-Norse mythology, and steampunk into a thick gumbo of weirdness.

Here's a sample, from a flashback as Muire begins to understand that the humans who have inherited the world from the gods are headed for their own apocalypse:

The tears that choked her breathing weren't from the wasp's futile venom. They came because she could no longer deny what she knew. Cascading catastrophe, the system in failure. It was not Muire's first apocalypse. But then, her kind had always been better at retribution than prevention.
And she knew as if it had been blazoned on a banner, with desperation would come war.
Black sorcery, radiation weapons, nanites, railguns, orbital assault, biotoxins and all the ills the flesh is heir to: Valdygard had died its first death in ice. The second was in flames. Mountains were heaved up and pounded flat. Oceans steamed and cities died in silence, suffocated under falling dust.
Eiledon... was spared.

This is some weird stuff. Kasimir, the valkyrie's mount, is a two headed deer-like winged creature. Horribly wounded, at the start of the story he is restored into a magical steampunk cyborg by one of the last miracles of the Children of Light.

So we've got ancient demigods, future technology, animal-human hybrids, cyborgs, killer cyborg flying reindeer/antelopes... it reminds me of Rifts.

Ah, Rifts, uber-nerdy game of my early teenage years. And some of my later teenage years. But hardly any of my twenties, I swear to god! Rifts, for those who decline to link, is the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pen and paper RPG. Created in the 1990s, it it set on a future earth wracked by both nuclear and magical holocausts, it includes cyborgs, giant robots, monsters, demons, elves, dwarves (and the whole Tolkeinian pantheon of near-humans) dragons, psychics, evil empires, Cthulhu critters, Atlantis, dinosaurs, vampires... I could just keep listing elements for line after line here.

Rifts, however, and the entire Palladium Games line, are mostly notable for being of fairly mediocre quality. The game system is antiquated by modern standards, the rules are cumbersome, character generation takes forever, and the books themselves are often marred by writing that's clumsy to downright bad. Throw in at least one or two proofreading errors in every book and you've got yourself a bargain basement games line, that survives on the sheer balls to the wall fun of its concept. Yes, you can be an elven commando who fights vampires with his cyborg dwarf buddy! Or you can be an Atlantean with magic tattoos, or a talking mutant dog with psychic powers!

All the Windwracked Stars succeeds (so far) because of the fine writing. So when you're not simply geeking out over the weirdness of the premise (a scandal when a main battle shoggoth crushed a student demonstration...) you're carried along by the melancholy tone that's set on the very first page. Muire is in mourning for one world that's died, and for another about to perish. The kind of subtle prose on display here is far from the rule-filled pages of an RPG intended for teenaged boys.

A lot of folks are doubtless going to label the book part of the New Weird movement, but I can't help but wonder if this mashup of fantasy and SF is just going to become mainstream in the future. To understand either All the Windwracked Stars or Rifts, you have to be immersed in SF and fantasy. It makes no sense outside a cultural context that includes Tolkein and Wagner and H.P. Lovecraft and Star Wars. That sphere, the nerdsphere if you will, has been expanding like a young universe for the last thirty years. Everyone has a passing acquaintance with it, many of us are deeply immersed. So Bear's book offers us, as the Norse would have it, kennings. Like barbarians around a campfire, she has but to mention a shoggoth, or an animal-human hybrid moreaux, and we know this to be an offhand reference to another tale, another saga for nerdkind. And we nod our heads in appreciation. Truly, this bard knows the old tales well.

Bear, like the makers of Rifts, has all the pieces to play with. What she does with it is what will distinguish her from the others who try this sort of hybridization. So far, I'm enjoying it immensely.

The most dangerous, er, passtime? Hobby?

2009-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

Normally "most dangerous game" episodes leave a bad taste in my mouth. They remind me of Bloodlust, which was made into an MST3K episode, or about bad episodes of bad syndicated action shows. Usually there are Rube Goldberg man-traps in the woods that are improbably fashioned out of half a dozen coconuts and some conveniently-placed vines. They're just silly.

So after the initial rush of last night's tautly paced Dollhouse ep was over, I thought to myself, did I really like this? Could I like a plot that's essentially been a cliché since 1937?

The answer is yes. I mostly liked the pilot ep of Dollhouse, but I found the main kidnapping plot to be a little stale. I didn't figure Joss would try to sell his fourth TV show by having a 12-year-old girl murdered by a pedophile, so she was pretty safe. It was just a matter of how they would get from A to B, and what little character moments would crop up along the way. Focusing most of those moments on the father of the girl, who I suspect we'll never see again, dissipated some of their force. It was good (compare it to any episode of any cop procedural with a similar plot) but it wasn't great.

This week's episode had constant turnabout. I really didn't see the manhunt thing coming, which may or may not be mostly because I'm a little slow to see plot twists, especially when I'm enjoying a show. We got some damn good dialogue, which suggested that this was not the first time the hunter has done this, not by a long shot. That he's a serial killer who found the Dollhouse perfect for his needs adds another layer of creepy to the show.

This week's episode also focused its character moments on our core cast. Echo is waking up, thanks to the hallucinogenic drink, likely supplied for that purpose by Alpha. Her handler, Boyd, moves from cynical indifference to seeing Echo as a person. Topher and the doctor are traumatized by Alpha's attack. And Alpha is... well, what is he?

My current speculation, utterly free of spoilers, is that he knows Echo/Caroline - or one of the pieces of his mind does. Just as Echo's composite kidnapping negotiator personality was shocked when it ran into someone it remembered, Alpha knows her. Now he wants to wake her up, too. How does he know her? From her early, cheerful college days or her later desperate stage? From her childhood? Were those her parents he killed at the end of the pilot? All questions that will be answered later.

Much like this question: how many people in the Dollhouse are permanent actives? Seriously, is Boyd really a cop, or is he an active with one set of programming instructions? He's pretty tough, skilled and knowledgeable. When you have that level of technology, why not use it to create your personnel?

How about Topher? Dr. Saunders? Adelle DeWitt? Lawrence Dominic? That girl across the hall from Agent Ballard?

Well, she's definitely an active. They might as well have written it above her head in big flashing letters. Not so subtle, Stephen DeKnight.

Man, I'm going to look stupid if that's a red herring.