Rusalka (an opera review post)

When we think of fairy tales we think of what? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? The Little Mermaid? Sure, because those are fairy tales, and they come to mind, but they come to mind in their Disney versions. The versions where everything has a happy ending. In fact, we so much think of fairy tales these days in terms of Disney that people say things like wanting a fairy tale wedding or a fairy tale ending. All I have to say about that is, "Fuck that!"

I mean, have you even read fairy tales? Do you know what they're really like? The originals? Like, in Sleeping Beauty, part of that story has to do with the fact that she was impregnated while she slept. And The Little Mermaid? Dissolved into sea foam. Dissolved! And washed away because the prince decided to marry someone else because trying to get on with a girl who couldn't speak was too much for him. And don't even ask about Cinderella's stepsisters' feet.

Back in the day, fairy tales were cautionary.

Imagine taking a cautionary tale, one in which the protagonist dissolves into foam at the end, and turning it into an opera, a form already rife with tragedy! Yes, Rusalka is largely based on Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid story, though it draws inspiration from other sources as well, especially Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Rusalka's not a mermaid, though; she's a water nymph. Close enough, right? Her father is the Water Goblin; he seems to be the guy in charge of all the nymphs. Not that that's explained, but the opera opens with all of the other nymphs cavorting around and trying to gain the "favor" of the Water Goblin. All while Rusalka pines over the prince who can't see or hear her because she's a water nymph and lives down in a lake.

But I'm sure you know how the story goes.
Apart from the tragic ending, that is.

As is so often with SFO, the sets were amazing! I mean, really amazing. Maybe the best sets they've had that we've seen? I don't feel qualified to judge that, actually. What I really loved was that during the forest scenes, which were full of nymphs and fairy creatures, the trees moved around. It made it feel really magical to have the scenery shifting around during the action. The rest was really impressive, too.

As always, the performances were excellent. I think Rachel Willis-Sorensen was especially good as Rusalka. She brought an appropriate amount of longing and despair to the role. There's not a lot of joy for the character, only that brief moment when the prince notices her (after she's made her deal with the witch) and takes her to his castle. After that, the prince goes about flaunting another woman, basically, right in front of her. It doesn't get better from there. Willis-Sorensen does a pretty perfect job of channeling the character's grief.

I'm not saying this is one of my favorite operas, but I enjoyed this one more than my wife did, a rare occurrence for us since my wife starts out at a much higher love for any individual opera than I do. She's loved opera since she was a teenager, and I'm just learning it now. She felt the music was too slow in this one, and I can see that, but, thinking about it now, I might describe it as lush rather than slow. At any rate, it's definitely an opera I'd be open to seeing other iterations of.

One other thing of note: Rusalka is a Czech opera, as was The Makropulos Case, which I am still rather fascinated with and would like to see again. And it's from Czech theater that we get the word "robot." But Czech opera and theater hasn't been very popular outside of itself, mostly due to the difficult language, according to the experts. I'm intrigued enough that I want more.

The Makropulos Case (an opera review post)

Way back in 2012 (wow! It's really been a while), I did a post about the introduction of robots (and androids) into fiction. The term "robot" was introduced by Karel Capek in his play R. U. R. or Rossum's Universal Robots. The term actually means "drudgery," which is the kind of works that robots were invented for. Capek is most remembered for his science fiction and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature SEVEN times, though he never won.

He also wrote a play called The Makropulos Affair (or Case or Secret or Thing, depending upon the translation) about an "immortal" woman. The play was seen by Leos Janacek who decided he wanted to write an opera based on it. When he approached Capek with the idea, Capek told him he was crazy and that it would never work. After some amount of correspondence, Capek relented and allowed Janacek to produce the opera.

I think there is probably actually too much I could say about this opera that sets it apart from your "normal" opera. For one thing, Janacek wrote the score and the libretto (the words), something not generally done by the composer. It is also done entirely recitative, which basically means sung dialogue; there are no arias. Recitative is not unusual in and of itself because it is somewhat required to tell a story, but that there are no arias is unusual. Even the horrible Usher House that I reviewed last year and was done (almost) entirely recitative had an aria. Just one, but it had one.

Having said all of that, Makropulos was fascinating, and I hate even bringing up Usher House, because there is no comparison between the two; there is only stark contrast. For one thing, the music in Usher was flat and droning, which created a rather monotone hum that was most appropriate for putting people to sleep. The music in Makropulos was driving and energetic and really carried the libretto, keeping it from becoming boring. Then there was the set design...

Well, forget Usher House; the sets for Makropulos were amazing. Huge. The set for act 1 was a library with something like a 20 foot tall ladder against the bookshelves which one of the performers climbed during the performance. [Interesting and morbid side note: During the first performance of Makropulos at the Met (back in 1996), just after delivering the line, "Too bad you can only live so long," the actor fell from the ladder and died later that evening.] During the open curtain intermission, you're allowed to take pictures, so I have this example of the scale of the set:

This is also one of those kinds of pieces where the lead really has to carry the production. There are plenty of other performers, but none of them are any more important than the next, so, if the lead is not dynamic, the whole production will fall apart. Nadja Michael played the role of Emilia Marty (or Elina Makropulos) like a cat trapped indoors. She draped herself across the furniture in odd ways and walked or crouched on it rather than the floor. She was quite excellent. All the performers pulled their weight.

I really enjoyed The Makropulos Case, and I would definitely see it again. It actually made me want to read the source material, which I would do if it wasn't a play. I just don't feel into reading plays at the moment. I may, however, pick up one of Capek's novels. That's a mark of a good production, I think.

Big Hero 6 (a movie review post)

Big Hero 6 is a movie that intrigues me on a lot of levels. It ought to have everything going for it.

It's based on a Marvel property (which I didn't even realize until I was seeing the movie (I can't say what gave it away (okay, I could, but that would be a spoiler))). That said, it's based on a Marvel property that I'm not actually familiar with so this is the rare adaptation (from a comic book) that I can see without having a picture in my mind of how it ought to be. Of course, I looked up the comic when I got home, and the path of adaptation they chose for this one is really interesting.

The comic is loosely set in the X-Men side of Marvel so has the full spectrum of mutants and all of that. The movie has removed everything that isn't technology based or transformed those things into something that is technology based. Basically, they made Big Hero fit into a slightly futuristic world in which people are still just people. And they did a really good job of it, too.

The movie does a great job with the exposition of the story. It's so typical of movies these days to just skip the exposition entirely, so I really appreciate it when a film takes the time to provide a foundation for the story they want to tell. Without having a way to check the timing on the movie, I'm going to guess the first half hour or so is all exposition. Let me re-say what I just said before: I like that!

Visually, the movie is incredible. Not just that it has great animation, but it has a great style. Actually, it looks a lot like The Incredibles, but that's not surprising considering that John Lasseter produced the movie.

Plus, it has the best drunken robot scene ever. Okay, that may not be surprising since it's probably the only drunken robot scene ever, but, still, it's hilarious.

The voice acting is adequate. There's nothing there to make any of it stand out except, maybe, for Scott Adsit, but it's hard to tell how much of that is him and how much is manipulation of his voice to make it work for Baymax.

The villain has a really cool look. That's all I'm saying about that. I mean, I'd be freaked out to have someone like that coming after me.

And the side characters work, too.

It has all the ingredients it needs for me to love it.

But I didn't.

Don't get me wrong; I really liked it; I just didn't love it. And I can't really tell you why other than that I saw the movie playing out the way it was going to go well before it got there. However, that was an interesting experience in-and-of itself, because my kids made the logic jumps the movie wanted them to make so that they would be surprised by what was actually going on when it was revealed at the end. I had to bite my tongue not to spoil it for them. For instance, at one point, my son said something about who the bad guy was, and I almost said, "No, that's not who it is," but I managed to catch myself.

I'm not really sure if that was the problem or not. It might also have been that the main emotional punch of the movie happens toward the beginning, so I had no catharsis at the end.

Really, it's not that important. It's a really good movie. It's great, even. It's just not excellent. It's not a movie I left the theater wanting to see again, which, for me, is the hallmark of an excellent film.

The short film at the beginning, though, that was awesome, and I'd love to see that again.

A to Z Flashback: 2012 -- Fiction to Reality

This year, 2014, is my third "A to Z," which would make 2012 my first one. There are a lot of you around these days that weren't around back then, so I thought -- Okay, actually, my wife thought. She said to me, "Since everyone seems to really like your theme this year (which, again, was her idea),you should do a post highlighting your previous A to Z themes." Which, um, were also her ideas. Yeah, she throws ideas at me all the time; some of them stick. -- I would drop an extra (Sunday) post in case any of you are interested in seeing what I've done before. So start at the beginning, right?

Well, not that beginning... that's too far back. Just the beginning of my participation in "A to Z," which was this:

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality

See, there's a link there, so you can go read the intro post if you want to. And here's a list of the topics I covered of things that started out as fiction, started out in some author's mind, made its way onto some paper, worked its way into some reader's mind where it poked and nudged until that person made that thing, that thing that was just made up by someone, into something that is real, something that works, and, often, something that has changed the world. There're all linked, so, if you see one you think you want to know about, you can just go directly to that one without having to wade through all 26. But, you know, if you want to wade through, or swim in, all 26, feel free to do that, too. Oh, and don't be shy about commenting on any of the old posts if you feel so lead. It's not like commenting expires or anything.

A -- Artificial Intelligence

B -- Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans

C -- Cyborgs

D -- Driverless Cars

E -- Exo-suits

F -- Flying Cars

G -- Genetic Engineering

H -- the Holographic Interface

I -- the Internet and the Invisibility Cloak

J -- Jekyll and Hyde

K -- Klingon

L -- Lasers

M -- Moon Landing

N -- Nanotechnology

O -- Opton

P -- Platforms

Q -- Quantum Communication

R -- Robots and Androids

S -- Snow Crash, Second Life, and Submarines

T -- Tom Swift and the TASER

U -- Ultraphone Ear-Disc

V -- Virtual Reality

W -- Wonka

X -- Xenobiology

Y -- the Yeast-Beast Machine

Z -- Zero Gravity and Zombies

NOTE: I did eventually read Snow Crash, prompted by how often it came up while doing research for this series, and I would never recommend it to anyone. You can read my review here.

Luck of the Sci-F(Irish)

Some of you may have noticed that I've been involved with this other group lately: Indie Writers Monthly. Mostly, it's geared toward science fiction and stuff. "Stuff" means all the other stuff that's generally associated with sci-fi. Things like fantasy and horror and and paranormal and... well, I'm sure some of you can see how I fit in even if I don't (yet) fit in with the science fiction. Well, except for my robot story, which is certainly science fiction.
Anyway...

I've seen the question come up here and there about why we call it "monthly" when there are so many posts each week. Well, here's the answer!

Click here to get it on Amazon today!

The first issue of our monthly magazine! Go grab it right now while it's FREE!

Pacific Rim (part 2)

As I said last time, Pacific Rim was an amazing movie to watch. Seriously impressive visual display. And it leads off with it, too, as we start out right at the first Kaiju attack. The problem is that it's a prologue, and a prologue with voice over, at that. I really don't enjoy that kind of thing in movies. To compound the problem, it was the prologue to the prologue. Yes, the movie had to have two prologues. Just about the time I was allowing myself to get into the movie and be unannoyed by the prologue, we find out that what should have been the beginning of the movie was just another prologue. So, now, we're something like 20 minutes into the film, and the actual movie hasn't even started.

That issue with the storytelling ends up being the movie's greatest flaw. Basically, they started what was an epic tale spanning years and skipped to the last battle. There's no emotional connection to any of the characters, no foundation for the arbitrary scientific-sounding crap they fling at you in the same way that chimpanzees fling poo (and, yes, I have a story about that... for another day), and no logic to the things that happen. IF they had started at the beginning of the story or, at least, closer to it, they could have built something more believable. It's kind of too bad, because, like I said, visually amazing.

I'm not even going to get into the specific story issues. They are just too numerous to list. In fact, I'm sure I've forgotten most of them. Let's just say this movie is more hole than cheese (Swiss cheese, you know).  I'll sum it up this way: After the movie was over and my friends and I were comparing notes, so to speak, they were all about how great they thought it was. But I wasn't saying much. Not much more than it was amazing to look at, at any rate. And they're used to this from me, to me being the one most likely to not like a movie, but I was really trying not to say anything, but I guess I had this look on my face, because they were all like, "What? What was it that you didn't like? Because it was amazing." So I said I would share the one thing I thought was the most stupid (the arbitrary choice to have two pilots because the "neural load" was too much for one pilot (like I said, there's a lot of scientific-sounding crap flung at the audience to achieve what they wanted in the story, but that "neural load" crap is just that: crap)), and one of the guys started to respond with "but the right hemisphere and the left...," and I just kind of looked at him, and he stopped, and, then, all three of them started spewing various stupidities from the movie. And that lasted for something like half an hour, and I never brought up another thing. So, see, all three of these guys that walked out of the theater loving the movie couldn't hold the stupid back once the gate was open, much like the Kaiju gate in the movie.

I wish I could say something positive about the acting, but there's nothing there to talk about. No one was horrible, but no one was great, either. Or, even, all that good. It was a 'fest of mediocre. Okay, Charlie Day was good, but he was as good as it got. I mean, Idris Elba was so flat, they had to give him a nose bleed to pass for emotion.

The whole movie was like getting a giant present wrapped in the most awesome wrapping ever: glittery paper, bows, a great card, but, when you open it, you find an open package of chewing gum or something. To put it another way: big hat, no cattle.

But I'd still say to go see it at the theater, because it's just that kind of movie.

So... The movie ended, and we were heading out, trying to follow this other guy that had been with us, but he was on call there at LucasFilm, so he was heading back to his desk, so we started out going that way, too, so we ended up going off through the building into areas I had never been...

And there was just so much cool stuff! Around one corner was a display case with a tyrannosaurus Rex model in it from Jurassic Park and, down the hall, a case with a model of the foot structure of the T. Rex. And, of course, more movie posters. And, in a little lounge area, a suit of silver robot armor from some commercial ILM did at some point, and, on the other side of that, a set of Tatooine Stormtrooper (sandtrooper) armor! I so wanted to touch it; I mean, it was right there, but I restrained myself. There were display cases of models all down the halls; I don't even remember them all. And, in a room that I could see into (but the door was locked), a full-sized model of some Sith Lord. It was dark in there, so I'm not sure who it was, but the red lightsaber was very visible. It might have been Darth Maul, but it could have been one of the characters from Clone Wars, too.

The walk through the hallways of the LucasFilm building was more than worth any number of bad movies. Next time, I have to make sure I have my camera with me.

How To Be... Q

So you want to be Q?

Well, unfortunately, you need to be born in the Q Continuum. Sorry. It's just not gonna work out for you.

Oh, wait!
You meant this Q

Well, that requires that you join the British Secret Service. Maybe. And being able to make nifty spy gadgets.

Oh, no, wait! That's not right, either...

How To Be... a Quantum Mechanic

Okay, so there's really no such thing as a "quantum mechanic." Yet.
However, with quantum communication on the horizon (possibly closer than you think), and quantum computers in development (the first one has already been built), and the possibility of all of this leading to artificial intelligence and robots and warp drive (also in development and has been done on a small scale), I can't think of a better name for the guy that has to come around and fix your tech when it breaks down. I imagine, at first, at least, that this will take a lot more schooling than a trade school.

My advice? Take as much quantum physics as you can. The next generation of technology is coming. It can't hurt to be prepared.

Tolkien's Failure (an IWSG post)

This is not one of those posts meant to make you feel better by allowing you to compare yourself to the failure of "stars" before they made it big. Actually, I hate those posts. I don't care how many times Rowling or Dr. Seuss or Stephen King or John Grisham were rejected before they met with success. If it makes you feel better when you get a rejection, well, good for you, but that's not what this post is about. Personally, I just don't find those kinds of stories all that inspiring, but, maybe, that's because I don't have an issue with persistence. Or maybe I just believe in the value of what I'm doing and don't care so much about the outside validation. That's probably closer to the truth. I do what I do because it's what I do, and I see the value in it, so I don't care as much whether other people do or not.

Sure, I'd like it if other people value my work, because, you know, it would be nice to actually make a living, well, even half a living, from writing, but I don't derive my worth from what other people think of my work.

I think it's vital that we don't derive our meaning from other people's opinion of what we do. After all, there's Van Gogh. Completely not appreciated in his own lifetime. We just don't, can't know how our work will be perceived later on.

Which brings me to Tolkien...

It might seem surprising, but Tolkien considered himself a failure in his literary life. Yeah, that's difficult for me to imagine, too, but it's true. But, then, it all comes from how we define our success, which is something I've mentioned before. The importance of knowing what it is you want when you start all this writing business. If you don't know what it is exactly that you want, you are sure to meet with failure, because you're going to layer over the world's idea of success over your life rather than your own.
Which isn't actually what Tolkien did, but, still...

So what happened with Tolkien?

The main thing to realize with Tolkien is that neither The Hobbit nor The Lord of the Rings was what he considered his real literary work. In many ways, those books were accidents. No, Tolkien's real work was The Silmarillion and his history of Middle Earth, work which never saw publication during his lifetime. So, despite the wide success and popularity of his two most famous works, he never believed he'd been successful because of the repeated rejection by publishers of his "real" work.

To put this slightly more into context: When Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit, it had nothing to do with Middle Earth. At all. It was a bedtime story for his kids. He didn't ever really mean to publish it. Only by the insistence of his friend, C. S. Lewis, and the accidental discovery of the manuscript by the publisher's son did it end up being published at all. Tolkien didn't take it all that seriously, and, like I said, it wasn't related to Middle Earth, which had already been his writing project for 20 years by the time The Hobbit was published.

The Hobbit was successful enough that the publisher wanted a sequel. Tolkien tried to give them The Silmarillion, but they turned it down. No, they wanted more hobbits. Tolkien sat down and began to work on that sequel: An Unexpected Journey, the book that eventually became The Lord of the Rings. See, as he was writing it, he realized that the stuff with the rings was the stuff from the end of The Silmarillion, and it was at that point that it all became a part of Middle Earth. It was an accident, and Tolkien had to go back and revise The Hobbit to make it part of  the narrative. Because, you know, it wasn't.

So, see, George Lucas is not the only one to go back and change things after the fact. That ring Bilbo found really was just, initially, a trinket. Something Tolkien threw in to enable Bilbo to escape from Gollum. He had to go back to the already published manuscript and make the ring important. Make into the One Ring.

Of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings became more and more popular. This is despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews when the books were published. Well, not so much with Hobbit, everyone loved The Hobbit when it was released, but, initially, the critics and reviewers hated LotR. But people did not, and they became great best sellers.

But it didn't matter to Tolkien, because, despite their success, he still couldn't get anyone to publish Silmarillion. He spent the rest of his life working on it and the other histories of Middle Earth, and no one would agree to publish it. To himself, he was an artistic failure. It would be rather like painting a great, intricate painting and not being able to get anyone to look at it, to study it, but, one day, sitting down with a kid and making a doodle for him and having everyone go crazy for the doodle. Tolkien was saying, "Look at this! Look at this!" and pointing at Silmarillion, but everyone was busy waving his doodle around saying, "But we like this!" And that is how things stood when he died.

It was only after his death that his son succeeded in getting The Silmarillion published.

So what is it I'm getting at here? Well, a couple of things, actually.
1. I think the thing that more people really need to do before they start writing is figuring out what they want to get out of it. I mean, what they really want to get out of it. Is the actual goal popularity? Is the actual goal to get rich? Is the goal immortality? Is the writing a path to something else or is the writing the goal? If more people knew this ahead of time, they might be more satisfied with their journeys.

Here is where Tolkien knew what he was doing. He knew what his goal was, and he didn't achieve that, so the success of his published works didn't matter so much to him, because those things were not his goal. He did actually fail to achieve his true goal.

2. Be malleable or flexible. Be able to acknowledge the things you do actually succeed at. Recognize your triumphs and adjust your goals to fit with where you are succeeding.

This is where Tolkien did not know what he was doing. His purpose was so single-minded and he was so unwilling to adapt that he was never happy, and he could not acknowledge the success of his two books. His creation, his Middle Earth, is brilliance. The scope of what he did is beyond what anyone else has ever done, and I'm not sure it's something that can be done again. Well, perhaps Asimov achieved something of the same thing with his robot and Foundation books. At any rate, so focused was Tolkien on the foundation, on The Silmarillion, that he could not see how The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings rested on that foundation and how much they relied on his entire body of work. They were a part of that whole; I think he just chose to ignore that.

The thing is, Tolkien's goal has actually been achieved; he just wasn't around to see it happen. The Silmarillion has been published along with so so so much more of his work. It's actually quite incredible what Middle Earth has become. It's too bad he wasn't around to see it happen, but... But.
That's kind of the thing, he did what he wanted to do and what he believed in, and, even though it took people a while to recognize it, they did recognize it. I think he would be dumbfounded to find how... pervasive... Middle Earth has become on a cultural level. Which is what he wanted. He wanted to create a mythology that would speak to people, and he stuck to it, and, in the end, succeeded. Beyond anything he might have imagined, I'm sure.

But, see, he knew what he wanted, knew what his goal was, and he stuck to that thing. I think the real achievement is being able to look at your work and know that you have done what you wanted to do. Which is why you have to know why you're writing. And, you know, if you are writing for fame and fortune, not because you want to write, maybe find some other way to get there, because writing isn't a great way to go about it.

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 2)

So... Giant robot models. They were a turning point I didn't see coming. These things

were fully articulated, which was really cool. They were a whole new level of complexity and a lot of fun to build, because, if you messed them up, they wouldn't move, and you didn't want that. My robot models were the envy of the neighborhood and the end of my career selling models. See, after I started on the robots, I never went back to mere airplanes again, and I wouldn't sell my robots. Period. I had a table in my room with all of them set up on it. This was one of my favorites:

A few of them even transformed.

There were at least three variations on the transforming kit. Basically, they were all the same model, but, you know, I had to have each one. Besides, they were the most challenging, because  the pieces had to be able to slide around. A kid that lived across the street bought one, because I wouldn't sell him mine, and he didn't even get the basic airplane mode out of his. His ended up a huge mess that he dumped on me to see if I could fix, but, you know, once those things are glued, there's not much you can do with them.

Anyway... High school started. I had this one friend; he was kind of my only friend at the time. Yeah, middle school was not a happy time for me, but, then, who is it a happy time for? But I digress...
I had this one friend who was in the school D&D club. Now, I didn't play D&D or any RPGs or anything, because, well, my parents wouldn't have approved. Not that I ever asked, because, when I was in about 6th grade, I'd ordered the books Clash of the Titans and Dragonslayer from my Scholastic order form at school, and my dad threw them away when I brought them home, because they had "magic" in them. It was rather traumatic and the end of any discussion with my parents about what I was reading. I figured role playing games were a bit too far to push it, though, so I'd never gotten involved. At that point.

Anyway... I had this friend, also a freshman, in the D&D club, and he mentioned to them my giant robot models. For some reason, none of them believed they existed. I think, by this time, the models were no longer being available in stores (I know I wasn't able to find them anymore, at any rate), so he started begging me to bring them to school to show the club. After a few weeks, I succumbed, and I brought a few of them to school with me. I have to say it didn't help my "nerd rating" and I already went to a nerd school, as my brother used to say.

Just to put this in perspective, these giant robots came with pilots. You can see the head of one looking out through the turret from the tank above. The "glass" cockpit cover on the top robot opened, and you could see the cockpit interior and pilot in there, too. These little pilot figures were around the size of 20mm miniatures, the standard size for D&D. Actually, they were slightly smaller, but close enough. And this is where everything changed:

1. I discovered that there was a game called Battletech that was based on this giant robot idea. It was more of a board/tabletop game than an RPG (at the time), and I immediately got interested in it. When my friend moved later that year, he gave me his Battletech stuff, which consisted of the basic game and one book of mechs.

2. I got flooded with requests to paint miniatures from guys in the D&D club. Yeah, they were so impressed with my models that they all wanted me to paint their figures for them. I started out charging $1.00 a figure but pretty quickly found that that wasn't going to work. See, one guy immediately brought me a huge bag of 30-40 loose figures, which I thought was pretty good money, but everyone else started offering me more money to bump their figures up the painting list. In the end, I was getting around $3.00/figure for fairly basic paint jobs. And, remember, I was using oils, because I just kept right on using my model paints. It was what I was used to using. The detail on the minis wasn't great, but it was a lot better than what they'd had doing it themselves, so everyone was happy.

Eventually, I started buying mech miniatures of my own for Battletech and started painting those, too. When I was a junior, the school shut the D&D club down, and, between that and the fact that I was never home anymore, I quit painting for other people. At that time. I continued to use oils on my miniatures for the next many years, but more on that next time...

Here are some pics of my oil painted mechs (ignore the dust contamination (I will never figure out how things accumulate dust while in a box!) and missing antennas). Several of these are the same class as the models I have. Wherever they are.

 Thunderbolts (I have this in model form)

 Hunchback (one of my favorite mechs) and a... Commando? I think. (no models for these)

Rifleman and Archer (no models for these, either)

Crusader (I think there was a model for this one, but I can't remember for sure)

Both of these were models.

As was this one (pictured above).

The only writing lesson I have from this is that sometimes you can take what you learned in one genre (models) and apply it to another genre (miniatures). Although I loved models and would kind of like to sit down and do one now, they never brought the same satisfaction as painting miniatures. I wouldn't have guessed that when I was 12, though. You have to be open to growth and change.

Note:

Make sure you come back on Monday for an awesome give away! 

Yeah, some of you may have what I'll be giving away, but it will still be awesome, and you can tell all your friends that don't have it!

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 1)

[Disclaimer: Some of this information is located in my "crafty" tab. There are also pictures there, if you haven't already seen them.]

I started painting when I was pretty young. Not like finger painting, either. What I mean is that I got serious about it at a point when most kids aren't interested in devoting that much time to something that requires that much sitting. Now, I loved to play outside as much (or more) than the next kid, but I also wanted my models to look good. Maybe it was my love of Star Wars that did it.

See, it was Star Wars that really sparked my interest in models. I'd had a few kits, but, like everyone else, I just put them together right out of the box with only the naked plastic to show for it. That meant airplanes that were completely white or cars that were completely black. Or red. But, mostly, black. That all changed when, around the age of 8, I got my first Star Wars model kit: an X-wing fighter. I loved it! Except I wasn't happy with it when it was all finished, because X-wing fighters, while mostly white, are not completely white, and I needed my model kit to look like an X-wing fighter. A real one. So I demanded model paints.

Just to be clear for those of you that don't know, model paints are oil based. Yes, this will be important. They have to be oil based, because water based paints, acrylics, won't stick to plastic. They just run off. Unless you prime the miniature, first, with a base coat of paint that acrylics will stick to, but I was 8, and I had no idea about any of that stuff. What I knew was that there were special paints for models in the model section of the toys, and I wanted some.

You do know that there is no longer a model section in most toy departments, right? It kind of makes me sad. Model building is actually something I would love to do with my kids, but, even if stores did still carry models, they are now much too expensive, which, I'm sure, is why stores don't carry them anymore. The same kit I might have paid $3.00 for when I was kid would be at least $30.00 these days, and, unfortunately, it's just not worth it.

Anyway... I started painting my models, but I still wasn't happy with them. For one thing, I wasn't really able to get them to look as good as I wanted them to look, but, mostly, it was that the idea, as it was presented to me, that you put the kit together, and, then, you painted it. This caused some problems, especially with airplane kits, in that, when you were finished, you'd have a painted exterior, but everything in the cockpit (or the interior of the car) was bare plastic, and it really detracted from  the overall look of the models.

During this same time period, I was learning about various painting styles from my mother in her ceramics class at my church. The real issue, though, was that we used acrylics on the ceramics, and they are a lot more versatile than oils. Really, the only way you can do anything interesting with oils is by doing airbrushing, which I wanted to do, but airbrush kits were expensive, and I wasn't willing to save up to buy one when I didn't know how to use it. Let me just say that you can't do any kind of real detail work with oils without an airbrush because the paint dries too quickly on any kind of detail brush, and the oil paints completely ruin brushes that aren't made specifically for them, and those brushes don't come in detail size.

The important things to know are that by middle school, I had
1. learned a pretty good bit about painting on a large scale by doing ceramics.
2. taken to painting the pieces of my model kits as I assembled them so that the interiors were also painted.

What all of this lead to was me owning a bunch of models that I didn't really want anymore, because I'd progressed so far beyond the skill I was at when I first did the older kits. Although I could go back and paint the exteriors, I couldn't take them apart and paint the insides. This lead to some creativity.

I had a thing for magnifying glasses, and I had pretty cool one that had a 6" diameter. I liked setting off firecrackers with it when we had fireworks at the 4th of July. Sometimes I'd  lite the fuses, but, sometimes, I'd burn right into through the body of the firecracker. We never got a lot of fireworks, so this kind of stuff made them last a lot longer. A lot of my friends would blow up their models at the 4th every year, but that was too easy and no fun. What I decided to do was to use my magnifying glass to make "battle damage" on the models. I eventually worked out some cool techniques which left them looking like they had smoke damage and all sorts of things. Once I finished giving a model I didn't want anymore "enough" battle damage, I would completely melt it down with the magnifying glass. Yeah, it probably wasn't the safest thing to be doing, but it was a lot of fun.

This went on until I got to some airplane that the kid across the street really liked. I mean, he really liked it, and he protested me destroying the plane. After a prolonged argument, he decided he would buy it from me to keep me melting it down. How could I refuse that? That first model, I sold for the same thing I paid for it. I figured it was a bargain, and I went out and bought a new kit. Pretty soon, I had kids from all throughout the neighborhood buying models from me. I sort of couldn't keep up with the demand. In fact, I sold off all of the models I didn't really want at an increasing rate that allowed me to buy more and more kits. I sold them all until I was down to the models I really wanted to keep, and I got offered some pretty high prices for some of those. Well, they seemed high to me. There was this one plane in particular that I got consistent offers of $15 for, a kit I'd paid, probably, $3 for, but I wouldn't sell it, because it was my favorite one. Sometimes, kids would go buy kits and pay me to build and paint them for them. It was a pretty sweet business for a 12-year-old is all I can say.

All of this continued until I discovered giant robot models.

I had most of these, and, actually, theoretically, they are still in storage at my parents' house, though I have no idea what kind of condition they may be in after all of this time. I wish I had pictures of my actual work, but this was 30 years ago, so you're just out of luck. I had almost every kit they made, though, and they were really cool as the robots stood over a foot tall. But more on all of this next  time...

Note:
Just to relate all of this to writing in a more direct way than the overall allegory I'm building:
Learning to write is rather like building a model kit. At first, everyone just puts the kit together and ends up with a rather plain looking whatever with no embellishment. Eventually, you figure out about painting and decals so that the it's a little dressier, but it's still not much on complexity. And even more eventually, you learn how to build your writing piece by piece just like painting the interior portions of the model first. Your writing gains depth and complexity and, maybe, even your own customizations like battle damage or mixing kits or whatever. You don't start out at the end, though. You have to learn to just glue the kits together in the beginning.

Have Some Milk with Your Serial

Today is the release of part 4 of Shadow Spinner

"Part Four: The Cop" is available for the Kindle for FREE! Monday, Sept. 10 -11! Go get it now for FREE! Also, just to be nice, "Part Three: The Bedroom" will also be FREE! Monday only. Go grab them now and, remember, click the "like" button and come back later and leave a review. It would be a great help! Thanks!

And, now, on to other things... sort of...

I started this whole serial release of Shadow Spinner as a bit of an experiment. While I'm not quite ready to reveal the details of said experiment (I still need a few more releases to figure out what I'm seeing as results), I will give you some background on the whole serial thing and part of what lead up to my decision to do a serial release.

Marketing is my bane. I hate it. It's something I wish I didn't have to spend my time on, because it takes away from time I could be, oh, working on actual writing like on Brother's Keeper, because, yes, now that school has started, I have several kids a week (at least) asking me when it's coming out. Of course, I'm trying to finish Shadow Spinner first (okay, I am going to finish Spinner first), but they don't care so much about that because they just want the sequel to The House on the Corner. Then there's the part where I'm pretty sure I would have finished Spinner already if I didn't have to spend time doing marketing stuff.

All of that to say that one of the things I've seen kind of over and over again in doing marketing research is that serializations are BAD! Bad in the same way that adverbs are BAD, and not you or anyone else should ever ever ever release a novel in a serial format. It made me wonder WHY.

I mean, why not do it? There is a long tradition of authors releasing their novels in a serial format. Charles Dickens did it. He even used it to get audience reaction to his stories so that he could make tweaks to stuff before the book was finally released as a book. Heck, the whole end of Great Expectations changed between the serial release and the final book release. All of Isaac Asimov's early stuff was released serially. The whole Foundation Trilogy (when it was still a trilogy) was released that way as well as all of his early robot stuff (which turned into I, Robot).

Sure, it's not done so much today, but, really, why not do it?

So here's something about me that you might not know... or, maybe, you've managed to figure it out, I don't know. Anyway... Telling me that something is wrong or bad for no other reason than that it is wrong or bad is a pretty good way to get me to try doing it. Or, at least, to take a closer look at it to see why you're saying that. You need to have a good reason for what you're saying is what I'm getting at here. In a like manner, telling me "this is just how it's done" and so you should do it this way, too, is a good way to make me look at other options. Give me reasons not dogma.

[I just have to throw in here that my first, great Magic deck was built because someone said a deck couldn't be built around the Kird Ape. I became feared in tournaments because of that deck. Yeah, I know that's completely off topic: I blame Michael Offutt for bringing up Magic: The Gathering on his blog recently.]

At any rate, that question wouldn't leave me alone, "Why not do serializations?" I couldn't find any good reason not to, so I decided to try it out.

Which brings me to my point:

It appears that Amazon Publishing is setting up some deals for some serializations under a new imprint they're going to be starting up just for that purpose. First, I didn't realize that Amazon had its own publishing imprints, but they do (several, actually, including one for sci-fi), and, now, they want to add a new one just for serialized novels. They're looking at it as the "logical next step" in publishing, evidently, because people like things in smaller bites, and like them in forms that work on  their portable devices.

It looks like I'm not the only one to ignore the whole "don't do serializations" thing. And this is why you should ignore the whole "no adverbs" thing, too. People just like to say NO for no other reason than saying it. And you can't get good reasons as to why not, because they don't have any; they just know that other people said NO, and that's good enough for them.

I don't know how this whole serial release thing is going to work out in the end, but I'm glad, now, that I'm doing it. Not that I wasn't glad before, but, see, I'm not jumping on any bandwagon here. Not that there will be a bandwagon, but, if there is, I was here first!

Just sayin'...

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Robots and Androids

Finally, we arrive to it: robots. So many of these fiction to reality posts have touched on robots or things robotic that I considered just skipping robots entirely, but, for some, that might be tantamount to ending a book just short of the climax and never finishing it. At any rate, robots have been, in many ways, what's driving this series of posts, so it wouldn't be exactly fair to leave them out, and I don't want any self-aware robots coming and asking me why I'd disrespect them in such a way. This post is also going to expand on my artificial intelligence post, so you might want to go back and read that one before going on with this one if you haven't already read it.

In many ways, the quest to develop or invent an "artificial man" has been as ongoing as the quest for flight throughout human history. These ideas extend back into myth and legend, and, as with flight, even Leonardo da Vinci had a design for a mechanical man. Maybe he even tried to build it. Instead of wading through all of that stuff, though, I'm going to jump ahead to our more modern view of what a robot is... except that we don't have a definitive view of what a robot is.

To facilitate the conversation, I'm going to define a robot as an electro-mechanical machine that has the semblance of intelligent behavior. These electro-mechanical machines can range from autonomous to remote controlled. This definition leaves out clockwork machines (which many people would like to say are the first examples of robots, but, then, that would, technically, make a clock a robot, and I'm not willing to go there).

Having said that, I will, however, go with Tik-Tok from Ozma of Oz as the first example of a modern robot in literature. Even though he was a clockwork, he was self aware and self motivating, making him a clockwork robot, not just a clockwork that looked like a man. It would be 15 years after the introduction of Tik-Tok before the word robot would be coined.

Tik-Tok

Speaking of, the term robot was first introduced in 1920 in a play, Rossum's Universal Robots, by Karel Capek. The word, basically, means drudgery, as that is the kind of work the robots in the play did. It doesn't end well for humanity.

As the 20th century progressed, robots became more and more common in fiction:

And, perhaps, the most famous robots ever (okay, not perhaps; we all know they are):

However, of all the fictional appearances of robots, it is probably Isaac Asimov's robot short stories and novels that have been the most significant, not least of all for his Three Laws of Robotics.

Surprisingly enough (at least to me), the first electronic robots were built in 1948 and 1949, Elmer and Elsie. The first truly modern robot was invented in 1954, the Unimate, by George Devol. He sold it to General Motors in 1960, and its installation began the modern robotics industry.

And this is where things get complicated. Complicated because the quest has always been to build an artificial human, not a mechanical arm, which is what the Unimate was. And for the last 50 years, that's what we've been trying to do. We've been trying to build the specific form of a robot that we call an android, which is what Asimov writes about, even if that's not what he calls them. But it is what we call R2-D2 and C-3PO -- droids. And here  is where we are today:

This is TOPIO 3.0, an android designed to play ping pong. He uses an advanced AI (artificial intelligence) that allows him to learn and improve his skill while playing. Basically, he adapts to the person he's playing against, learns how that person plays and adopts a strategy to beat the opponent. You can learn more about TOPIO here; although, I don't see a record of his wins and losses listed.

This is an Actroid, the most sophisticated android currently "alive." The newest model is named Sara

You can watch her explain how she works.

So... we're not quite to self aware, self motivating robots and androids, but we are stepping in that direction. In fact, robots are one of the biggest driving forces in AI research. Science fiction author Vernor Vinge (A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky) believes we are heading toward a "technological singularity" (a term he coined) in which we will technologically develop a greater-than-human intelligence. Because we cannot comprehend the kinds of changes that will occur after such an intelligence is created, he calls this an "intellectual event horizon." With all the research and development in quantum computing and quantum nodes, I have a hard time thinking he's wrong. [My friend Rusty (who drew this picture of me) has been going on about Vinge for some time, now, and, so far, I haven't read anything by him. Not because I haven't wanted to, but because I'm way behind on my reading and haven't wanted to try to work anything new into the stack until I cut it down some; however, after reading this stuff, I'm going to have to work Vinge in.] It's not that Vinge is the only person to have written about these themes; we see them in science fiction a lot, usually with a very negative spin on it (the Terminator franchise, the Matrix trilogy), but he is the first to state his view so concisely, and this idea permeates much of his work. It will certainly be interesting to see how the future progresses in regards to artificial intelligence and robots!


The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Artificial Intelligence

"Artificial Intelligence," as a term, was not invented until 1956, but, as a concept, it goes back much further. As a term, it means the science and engineering of making intelligent machines; as a concept, it means man, through science, creating intelligence where there was none.

Generally speaking, when we think of artificial intelligence, which I will just call AI, we think of computers. Past that, we think of robots. Computers, games in particular, have gotten sophisticated enough that the term AI is already being applied to them even if it's not precisely correct. The thing is is that computers are capable of learning. Adapting. The only real issue is that we're not quite sure, yet, how to determine at what point something becomes capable of thought. Independent thought. Pondering. And how does something become self-aware, which is a component we seem to believe is necessary for intelligence.

At any rate, the idea that computers will achieve the ability to think and become self-aware has been a huge focus of science fiction since before computers were actually a thing. Let's just pretend that that part where humans are trying to build machines that have legitimate intelligence isn't really happening. Or has happened?

Anyway...

Although, Isaac Asimov was not the first person to write about robots, he was the first person to write about them extensively, and his robot stories and novels laid the foundation for all future robot literature. His work is so fundamental, in fact, that people sometimes refer to his Three Laws of Robotics as if they were an actual, real thing, not something from a short story.

I remember the first time I heard of the three laws. It was an episode of Buck Rogers. I was 10 or so. The robot Twiki had had some sort of problem and was being re-booted. He quoted the laws, and the doctor/scientist guy got all excited and commented in awe about how they were hearing (for what sounded like the first time ever) Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

All of that to say, that Asimov has been instrumental in our cultural understanding of what artificial intelligence is even though he was first writing his robots stories at least 70 years before artificial intelligence would exist. His ability to see the possibilities of what could be were extraordinary.

Why has Asimov become such a central figure in the foundation of literature involving artificial intelligence? Well, I think I have an explanation for this. Robots, machine men, were commonly being used as the symbol for how technology and the pursuit of knowledge would destroy mankind. Yes, this is in the 1930s. But, then, if you look at what was going on in Germany and what would happen in World War II, this is somewhat understandable. Basically, robots were only used as an example of the Frankenstein complex: the creation rising up and destroying the creator. Asimov wanted to change this. He felt it was a tired cliche and supported the view that knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge is bad or wrong. First and foremost a scientist, Asimov believed in  the pursuit of knowledge, so he sought to make robots into something more realistic in his writing, not just a symbol of technology leading to our downfall. Not that that is not still a common symbol and fear, but he broadened our horizons on the subject and set the foundation for modern artificial intelligence in fiction.

Just as an aside, the character Tik-Tok from Ozma of Oz is probably the first significant use of a robot with its own intelligence in fiction. The term "robot" hadn't even been invented yet. There are a couple of other earlier mechanical men in fiction, but those works have mostly faded with time, while Baum's Oz books are still read and enjoyed today. That makes Tik-Tok the first (significant) artificially intelligent machine in literature.

But speaking of the Frankenstein complex...

I'm going to make a leap here and say that Frankenstein is really the first source of artificial intelligence in literature and fiction. There are often earlier sources cited, but they involve the use of magic, and I want to confine this to intelligence created through scientific means. Of course, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein was a human machine, but the intelligence created, the mind created, was new and unique. Shelley's novel may be the first example of technology, of man's creation, rising up against him. As mentioned, it is the name that has come to be applied to those types of stories.

I'm not going to say that we, as a race, are striving toward the creation of artificial intelligence because of fiction, but fiction writers certainly saw it coming long before science did. Because our cultural awareness is so influenced by what has gone before, I would find it difficult to believe that whatever is coming in the realms of artificial intelligence will not have fantasy and science fiction at its roots. It will not surprise me at all to find one day that Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have, indeed, become reality.