We Are Legion

Legion is Sanderson's novella that I put on my e-reader; he has another one coming out soon that takes place in the Elantris universe (I'm hella stoked about that one). My first, strongest impression: it's short. Very, very short. Disappointingly short.

But it's good. The basic story is about a guy who invents various hallucinatory personas that advise him on how to do things. So, essentially, the main protagonist is a well-rounded genius who can know anything, but who's not really sane. And the plot revolves around a 'magic' camera that can take pictures of the past, and a guy who wants to use it to confirm the truth of his religion. I have to say, as far as uses for this camera, go, it's fairly innocuous.

The story was enjoyable and interesting; Sanderson is just too damn talented. It doesn't really come alive the way some of his fantasy novels do, though, and his protagonist was fairly generic (again, it was short). But the most interesting thing I have to say about Legion is this: it shouldn't have been a book.

Some people might see this as a criticism, but it isn't. I might like books more than movies, for example, but no medium is really better than another. But the mediums are different, and they have different strengths. While the novella Legion has a lot of action occurring mentally, it takes place through conversations with imagined people inside his head. Tell me that doesn't sound perfect for a televion show.

The character even lives the life of typical A-Team/MacGyver/USA Channel protagonist, where random people come to him requiring his unique portfolio of skills and abilities. Episodic as hell. I think it could work. The Pretender was years ago, after all, and the mental 'illness' angle of it gives it a potential for more serious drama and meaningful interaction with other people in the world.

Seriously, Sanderson, if you know someone who in television, get on the phone and make your pitch. Actually, don't. I'd rather read one of your books; Alloy of Law was way too much fun.

Where Have All the Starships Gone?

I might be mistaken, but I've noticed a trend in science fiction recently. There's not that many spaceships. I think science fiction has trended away from spaceships, even though a starship is basically the iconic image of science fiction. They aren't conspicuously absent, but there does seem to be conspicuously less. It shouldn't be the alpha and the omega of the, of course, but the spaceship is scifi most beloved icons.  The apocalypse is big now, of course, so that has something to do with it, but I think there's more to it than that.

It might also be the growing realization of just how impractical space travel is, that humanity won't be going to other star systems or colonizing worlds anytime soon. The best we can do is watch billionaires go into space, and cheer on Curisosity and Mohawk Guy (does anyone else follow the Mars Rover on Twitter? Pew pew! Hilarious).

I blame Star Trek. It's not it's fault, of course. The original series only lasted a few seasons, but it spawned four other shows, tons of movies, books, video games, and who knows what else. It was successful as hell. If anything, it should have spawned more spaceships, as people flocked to imitate it.

But that's passed by now. Now, Star Trek is a bloated, decayed corpse of an elephant in the middle of the room, that everyone else has to step around to avoid. Any kind of high technology starship story is going to invite, fairly or not, comparisons to Star Trek.

Deal with it. Obviously differentiation is required, but that seems easy to do in a hundred different ways. Science fiction needs to get over Star Trek, and reclaim the stars for all of the other fun science fiction stories that should be told.

And while we're talking about getting over things, Firefly is not coming back. Yes, it was great. Yes, it's criminal that it got half a season when Dollhouse somehow got two. Yes, Syfy should scrap every other show and awful monster movie they're working on to bring it back on the air. But it's not happening, so let's hear about some other cool scifi show on television...there has to be one, right?

Next time: I finished Legion (it was really, really short), and my thoughts on Sanderson's novella.

Redshirts and My Thoughts

I wanted to come up with some semi-clever title about Redshirts to prove how clever I am, but I couldn't. And so blood loss makes dullards of us all. Oh well. I don't think that it's much of a spoiler to say that at it's heart, Redshirts is about Star Trek though, so let me get that out of the way right off. If you don't know what a redshirt is, follow the link and hang your head in shame, because even I know and I have seen ONE episode of Star Trek.

Star Trek isn't a big deal to me, so I might fall out of the target market of this book a little bit; I liked Wrath of Khan (and I love randomly opening this window to annoy my roommate whenever I'm slightly vexed - major sound warning. Seriously. It's really annoying.), and I liked the remake but thought it was too careful not to upset the diehard fans who care about the reboot continuity. It's not like Batman Begins tried to tell us that this happened in a different timeline as the first Batman movie, Adam West TV series, and original comic books because Superman traveled around the Earth quickly; it's just a different story, deal with it.

So with that out of the way, I can say that I thought Redshirts was enjoyable and entertaining. It was less enjoyable and entertaining than any of Scalzi's other books, and I'm not even a Scalzi fan. The premise starts off entertainingly enough, more or less 'ordinary' science fiction heroes stuck on a starship that has the same stupid shit that happened to the poor crew of the old Enterprise. Away missions are invariably fatal to the poor redshirt stuck accompanying the senior officer, the laws of drama have more power than the laws of physics, and technobabble explanations are the order of the day.

The first half of the book was definitely the more entertaining half though. Once the true explanation is revealed, however, the quality plummets. The book devolves into overly meta nonsense. I don't want to drop any major spoiler bombs that an intelligent reader couldn't figure out two pages in, so I'll avoid specifics, but by the end the characters are practically breaking the fourth wall, which has always seemed to me incredibly amateurish. But if you like meta stuff, maybe you'll like the second half, I don't know.

To me, though, it's always amounted to intellectual masturbation, ultimately pointless. It essentially involves lampshading the lack of any real story or characterization. Speaking of characterization, it's weaker than Scalzi's usual fare, which I think even he would agree is not his greatest strength. And that might be why the book just didn't click for me; the characters are weak. In terms of how they're characterized, regardless of whatever rank they might hold in Starfleet (or whatever the organization is called in the book), they're extras. To put it simply, they're not main character material. I don't end up caring more about them by the end than I do at the beginning.

And despite Howard Taylor's description of the book as a call to arms to creators, well, I've always been against what I could describe as dumb, stupid character deaths for the point of drama. In fact, that's where the title of my blog comes from, my critique of character's behavior not stemming from any real motivation, but because THE PLOT DEMANDS IT. And maybe the characters don't die pointlessly, but the narrative still has an iron grip upon the flow of the plot of Redshirts.


So, I realize I sound incredibly negative, but I'm always more negative than positive. I enjoyed Redshirts....but not that much. Maybe I'm just not a Star Trek fan. My next blog post will be about science fiction, space opera, and Star Trek.

Things To Come

I'm going to put up a short post of what's might be happening on this blog in the near future. I've loaded copies of Redshirts by Scalzi and Legion by Sanderson into my e-reader, so once I finish them I'll post my thoughts on each of the novels.

My friend should also be finishing his second novel, Skull and Bones, and I'm going to be doing a couple of posts reading through it, analyzing it, and soliciting feedback about it. I haven't read any of it yet, but I've heard it described as a Pulp novel, so that should be fairly interesting. I also ended up giving him the name of his villain, Eigenstolf. If that name isn't a selling point, I don't know what is. :)

In Praise of Awful

Much like everyone else in the entire world, I enjoy movies that are good. In fact, that's probably my working definition for a good story (i.e. enjoyable). But I also love bad movies. No, that's not exactly true: bad movies are fairly common. I enjoy the terrible, the awful, the godawful, the movies that are cinematic train wrecks.

Now to be fair, these movies aren't much fun to watch by yourself, but if you can get a bunch of your equally witty friends together to mock the thing, they're hilarious. And if you're stuck on a space station, you can always cobble together some robots from scrap metal to fill the void (you might need to do the voices yourself, though, and prepare for a complete mental breakdown). This is the basic formula of Mystery Science Theater, although the commentary can vary in quality (and they're always stealing my lines :( ).

I recently watched what is commonly considered to be the worst movie ever made: Manos, the Hands of Fate. Behold!

More impressively, I've seen it twice, since one of my friends wasn't present for the initial viewing, and he would have missed out on all the new in-jokes we have about the film. I worry that a third viewing might actually kill me. I could write a week's worth of posts about why it's bad, but either take my (and everyone else's) word for it, or watch it yourself (with friends).

Interestingly, I think the time is ripe for a Manos sequel. After all, in August they showed Manos throughout theaters across the country; it's legendary badness has promoted it to cult status. And the ending certainly leaves room for a sequel. I'm trying to talk my friend's little brother Chris into directing the film. After all, he was the film genius behind all of the film projects we turned in for easy As in high school.

I've seen two other films that aren't quite as godawful as Manos, but still so terrible to be entertaining. And while neither has made it to DVD, you can find them on Netflix streaming service. The names of the movies are Unmasking the Idol and Order of the Black Eagle. Both star the same balding (yet sexy by script) secret agent, Duncan Jax: the first is a weird combination of Bond, Indiana Jones, and Enter the Ninja, the other is a slightly less weird combination of Bond and Commando. Oh, and his sidekick is a baboon, and clearly the brains of the operation.

Can I sell these movies, or what? After watching them, we gave them a 4 and 5 star review on Netflix...ratings that they still hold, at least from a few days ago. I think we were the only ones who reviewed these. The movies are also surprisingly racist for something made in the 80s.

What I love about these kinds of movies is how bad they are. Their creator didn't let fear hold him back. If he worried that he was making something awful, these films wouldn't have ever seen the light of day. There's a kind of exuberance to these works that I respect (perhaps the only thing I respect about them, from a creator's standpoint).

More, I think we've all seen stuff that we hated. Films that were uninteresting, or boring. Films where you couldn't really recount what happened walking out of the theater, or films where you just couldn't find yourself caring about what happened to the characters. These are films that were merely bad. But the truly awful films are ones that take huge swings and miss, hard. They're the ones you remember.

Books, are a little different, but I'd much rather create something truly terrible than something that was merely bad, or even mediocre. Something people could laugh about; something I could even laugh about (years down the line, probably, but still).

Zombie Attack!

I love zombies. They're unfeeling killing machines made all the more horrific by their former identity of living beings, but without all the gothic whining of the vampire. Best of all, zombies are inherently proactive: they want flesh/brains/whatever, and they spread their infection to everyone in the world sooner or later. They're great bad guys, more of a force than a character though.

But these days, they're everywhere. Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, DayZ. Resident Evil. Zombieland. Dawn of the Dead. Some French movie on Netflix called the Horde. The Walking Dead. Hell, even the CDC released a zombie survival guide in some vain attempt to be cool. It wasn't a very good guide, of course - no weapons, nor anything unique to the challenges facing those living in a  world populated with the walking dead. Zombies have gotten so 'mainstream' that my dad actually linked me to the CDC guide, and I'm pretty sure he still has trouble figuring out Youtube.

The point is that the only way I could see more zombies is if there was an actual zombie apocalypse. Which would actually suck, by the way, that Facebook group non-withstanding. They've become such a, well, inoffensive, generic bad guy, that for some stories they're more secondary bad guys/ background than anything else - after seeing an episode of the Walking Dead, I made the argument that it wasn't really ABOUT zombies. It just happened to have them in it.

I hate to say it, but zombies might be played out. If not, they're certainly getting there. A decent zombie story these days requires differentiation, a unique take on the zombie apocalypse. I've never put a lot of thought into my own permutation, but I'd go after one of the common rules of zombies: water is safety. Living in the Midwest, escaping the apocalypse by taking a sailboat to some isolated island is much more of a long term goal for me in case of sudden zombies, so I don't put a whole lot of trust in it. In truth, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, since I don't see why zombies couldn't swim to the supposedly safe island in their endless quest to devour all human flesh.

So I'd do the reverse. Zombies come from the sea. They swim quite well. The tides are changing, they sweep in, bringing thick fog, and the zombie hordes of the drowned climb up the beaches of coastal towns, killing people and throwing them back into the ocean to rise as more sea zombies. As the apocalypse spreads, the sea level could be rising; if I wanted to be a preachy environmentalist I could connect it to global warming or something.

And on a side note, if anyone reading this gets bitten by a zombie during the apocalypse, do us all a favor and admit it. You're not special, not immune, and you'll save your buddies a lot of trouble. :)

Apocalypse Then

The post-apocalyptic genre. In case for whatever reason, you're not familiar with it, post-apoc is a setting for stories set after the fall of humanity, where life as we know it has been destroyed by some awful calamity, yet people live in this terrible new world as best they can. The Wikipedia article listing post-apocalyptic fiction is pretty damn useless, since it includes stuff like Signs, which isn't post apocalyptic at all.

Probably the most iconic post-apocalyptic fiction to my mind is the Road Warrior, a film I watched as part of a high school film class. Ah, good times. A bleak desert wastelands, gangs of raiders, and a combination of the technological and the primitive. And a bunch of weird outfits you'd only ever see from an eighties movie. Mad Max was just bad, in my opinion, and Thunderdome 's best feature is "Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves." And the knife in the flyswatter, of course.

But there's more than Mad Max. There's the Fallout series of PC games. And who could forget Waterworld (never have the amnesiacs been so blessed)? The Road? The Book of Eli (was anyone else hoping it WASN'T the Bible, just for a change of pace)? And then we have the whole gamut of works that combine the post-apocalyptic with terrible dystopia. Even the Matrix could be argued to be post-apocalyptic, even though it's way more about cool guys with slowmo gun fights than the downfall of society.

The genre is about far more than just having the excuse for savage violence, however. In fact, interestingly, it seems that whenever more critically respected writers, i.e. those outside "genre fiction" venture into the far more interesting branches of writer-created reality, they almost invariably gravitate towards the post-apocalyptic (Handmaid's Tale, anyone?). I'm not entirely certain as to why, but I can take a few guesses.

More traditional science fiction is about the future, and mankind's hopes and dreams (it's also about gratuitous space battles). The post-apocalyptic and dystopian subgenres are more about the fears and nightmares of mankind. It's kind of hard to write a happy post-apocalyptic story, since even if your characters end up happy, that happiness is built on the bodies of millions. And preying on the negative is certainly the easier, more common choice in the world; it's certainly seen as a more mature topic.

And the dystopian genre already has what most would consider to be definitive works of the genre. Post-apocalypse? Not so much. World-building is also much easier in post-apocalyptic, since you don't need to create any kind of functioning society. Instead, all you need to do is mess society up until it stops working.

The creator of the post apoc story, unless it's a particularly important plot point, will generally pick the most likely method of apocalypse. In other words, whatever we fear at the given point in time. Nuclear war doesn't seem a very likely way to go out these days, so instead we use pollution, mass resource shortages, whatever.

Speaking of fear, the popularity of the post apoc genre seems to see surges in times of uncertainty, in the wake of crises of all kinds. I don't know if it's because the times make the idea of the apocalypse seem more plausible and likely, or because maybe because we want the reassurance that someone's going to survive it.

Next time: Zombie attack!