Sundiver (a book review post)

I had high hopes for this book. Okay, well, that's not exactly true; it's just that I haven't read a book I really loved in a while now, and I was just hoping to at least like this one. It's an award winning book, and my wife liked it and the other books in the series back when she read them, though that was a long time ago at this point. Needless to say, I was disappointed. In the book, not my wife.
I was disappointed a lot.
Not Snow Crash a lot, but a lot nevertheless.

But I think I get it, why sci-fi fans like this book and Snow Crash and other books like them: They're responding to the concepts, the ideas, rather than to the book itself and the actual writing. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good idea, but I think if you're going to make it into a book, you have to back it up with some writing that supports it, and this book didn't have that. Nor did Snow Crash.

So, yeah, yadda yadda, uplift, yadda yadda. The idea is that older alien races will find pre-sentient lifeforms and raise them to sentience and be their patrons. There's this whole galactic system for it. Yes, it's an interesting idea, but the book... Man, it was hard to read.

Mostly because the protagonist was his own deus ex machina. As it turns out, Jacob, the main character, had a split personality, and he somewhat inappropriately referred to his alter ego as Mr. Hyde. Basically, any time Jacob ran into a situation he couldn't handle he could whip out Hyde and Hyde could do it. Because Hyde could do everything. Need a lock picked? Hyde can do that. Need to pocket someone else's belongings without anyone else seeing? Hyde can do that. Need to shit flying monkeys out of your ass? Well, Hyde didn't do that, but it wouldn't have surprised me.
It's lazy writing, though, having a way for your protagonist to personally meet any and all challenges on his own with his own secret weapon. Actually, it reminds of a horrible 80s movie, The Dungeonmaster, in which the hero had a laser-firing, computer watch that would defeat all of the bad guys.

As a total aside, that is one of the strengths of the Harry Potter books: Harry can't do much of anything on his own. I mean, he needs help, a lot of it, and he gets it by having a support team around him. Secret Harry never pops out of his head with all of the correct spells to accomplish whatever he needs to do at any given time. It makes him believable as a character.

Having a split off personality hiding in your brain does not make for a believable character.

Not to mention the part where anytime the story would get stuck because the characters didn't have enough information to move forward (not to mention the audience), Hyde would pop up with an insight and move the plot forward. Not that it was an insight Hyde had any right to have, but, hey, when the author gets stuck with how to move the plot along... Yeah, just toss the new info in from, basically, nowhere.

As if that's not already asking a lot from the reader in terms of accepting things, we also have to believe that we've managed to make spaceships that can fly in the sun... using "refrigerator" lasers. And I'll buy that. I mean, I will if that's the thing the author is asking us to accept but, then, he has to throw in aliens that live floating around in the outer layer of the sun. And other stuff... All together, it was just too much to put up with at any given moment. Something was always coming across as dumb to me because there was just too much to buy into.

Mostly due to the issues with the protagonist. But when you have that going on, when I can't buy into the main fucking character, then I can't buy into the rest of the story.

And, as if that wasn't enough, the author kept adding things in that really should have been a part of the fabric of the book. It was as if, as he was writing, he'd have a brilliant idea about something that should be in there and, from that point onward, that thing would be in the book, but he never wove those things back into the story that he'd already written. And maybe that's just me, as a writer, who is seeing that, but I know how that kind of thing goes and, if you're unwilling to go back and work those things into the bit you've already written, then leave them out of the book.
Seriously.

So... I suppose the real question, now, is whether I'm going to go on to the next book in the series. Honestly, I don't know. I have the books here and had planned to read the series because I had thought I was going to enjoy it and all of that. And it's one of those things where I have this question poking at me now about what people have seen in these books. Maybe the next one's better? Book two does, actually, have higher ratings than this one. For the moment, though, I'm going to read something else. Once I finish that book, I'll see how I feel about giving Startide Rising a chance. I'd say it's not looking good but, then, I did read all of that Lovecraft shit and L'Engle's mess, too.

At the Mountains of Madness (a book review post)

Yes, I'm still working my way through Lovecraft. No, I wouldn't recommend him to anyone else, not in general. There are a few, just a few, stories I'd suggest for anyone wanting to try him out. This is not one of them. Especially not at its length.

Funnily enough, when Lovecraft wrote this story, it was considered a novella but, by today's standards, it's novel length. It's more than 12,000 words longer than his next longest story and, I'm pretty sure, he could have cut all of them out. All of them. No, Lovecraft is not an author who gets better with length; he just gets more repetitive. I mean, it's possible that all 12,000 of those words are instances of "cyclopean" (one of Lovecraft's favorite words) and "decadent" (a new favorite for this story (seriously, if I ever again hear the term "decadent statue," it will be too soon (What even is a "decadent statue"? Lovecraft never says. He just tosses in the descriptor at some point to differentiate between the earlier statues))).

I did have hopes for this story when it started out. For one thing, it has a new setting. A new setting for Lovecraft, at any rate, though it's not really a common setting: the Antarctic. And it starts out well enough as Lovecraft goes into the scientific mission of the team and setting up the base camp and all of that but, of course, there's an unexpected discovery and everything goes horribly wrong.

Also, of course, the narrator isn't present for any of the action. That's how Lovecraft do. But what that does is forces the author to only tell you what happened, never to show it. It just gets boring after a while. Even when Lovecraft puts the narrator into the action, it ends up being passive. The narrator gets scared and runs away and never even sees what he's running from. His companion does, but that thing, whatever it was, is never revealed. You just have to trust that it's something really scary. So scary that the narrator's companion can't speak of it, another trick of Lovecraft's: the nameless terror.

It's so old, Man! Get a new trick.
Oh, no, wait, this is one of Lovecraft's last pieces, so it's not likely that he's going to find any new tricks.

The real problem with the story, though, is a thing a lot (maybe most?) of sci-fi authors have a problem with: I came up with a really cool idea and I want to tell you all about it even though it has nothing to do with the story and my character has no reason to know anything about it. Like a Joe Shmoe explaining how warp drive works or something. Of course, Lovecraft has to surpass everyone else and spend half of his book explaining something that his character shouldn't know, the back story of an alien race.

Sure, Lovecraft tries to make it plausible for his protagonist (I use that term loosely since the character does nothing more than walk around then run away) to know what he knows, but it's a ridiculous supposition, and you have to have severe cognitive dissonance to believe that his character could decipher and read the entire history of this race in the short amount of time allotted to him to do so by Lovecraft. It hurt my head, actually, trying to pretend that I could go along with the idea long enough to finish this "book."

Grass (a book review post)

One of the modern myths of American protestant religion is that God wants to have a personal relationship with you. With you, specifically. The best part about that is that "christians" think that's how it has always been, that that thought about God has always been there. But that's just not true. The idea of a "personal God," a God who wants to be "friends," originated with Enlightenment thinking and has only been around a couple or few centuries, but didn't really take off till the middle of the 20th century through evangelists like Billy Graham and his whole inviting Jesus into your heart schtick.

Prior to that, the thought about God had been more... communal. God didn't know or care about you as an individual person, only as part of humanity. That's the reason in the Catholic church you didn't appeal to God directly but worked through advocates. God didn't have time for you, but St. Joseph or St. Matthew might. It's something like the owner of a large company not knowing who every employ is, but your manager knows who you are and you can talk to her with any concerns.

As such, according to Tepper's presentation in Grass, people don't have individual purposes handed down to them by God. People have a purpose as a race, and God isn't up in Heaven handing out purposes to everyone like ice cream cones. It's up to the individual to help make sure the purpose of humanity is fulfilled, and that's as close as you get to having a purpose.

I like Tepper's view. It makes sense.

Not that that's how she presents it.

But if mankind were to have a purpose, what would it be? Something like taking care of the Earth, maybe? Which we have done a piss-poor job of and many of us, especially those in power, try to pretend like everything is perfectly fine. Nope, no climate change happening here! Move along. Because, you know, it doesn't really affect them, and they all have the money and position to avoid the negative consequences of the global devastation that is already beginning to happen. If they, the rich and powerful, are going to survive, why worry about anyone else or curing the plague at all?

And, now, I've told you a bit about the book without telling you anything at all. I suppose you'll just have to read it to understand what I mean.

Which brings us to the question of whether the book is worth reading...
I would say yes. It's a quite good book. Generally speaking, Grass is regarded as Tepper's best book, though I would say The Gate to Women's Country is better. I can't do better than that; those are the only two of Tepper's books I've read so far, though I do have a couple more on standby and just discovered that Grass is the first of a trilogy, so I'm going to have to look into the other two of these, also.

What I can say for sure is that Tepper is under appreciated as an author, and I can't really figure out why that is. Unless it's because she was a woman writing in the male dominated sci-fi field, and I'm not saying that, but I probably could, and could probably make a strong case for it. As someone who's read a lot of sci-fi (A LOT), I would say that Tepper is among the best I've read. But, then, I wouldn't expect The Gate to Women's Country to be raking in the male fans, and men and the patriarchy don't fare much better in Grass.

None of which is to say that the book isn't without its flaws. She gets a little overly explain-y when she gets into the plague, what causes it and... all of that (no spoilers!). Also, it takes a while to get to what the point of the book actually is, but, then, the protagonist, Marjorie, takes a while to come to grips with that herself, so I suppose that's understandable.

But the flaws are slight, like coming across a salty bite in your eggs, a momentary unpleasantness before returning to your scrambled goodness.

I would mention, though: Tepper seems to like telepathy and mind powers. Out of two books, so far, both have had elements of this. And I'm assuming the next two books in the Arbai sequence will also contain these elements since they're sequels to Grass. On a personal level, I'm not sure how I feel about all the telepathy and stuff. That's still something I'm dwelling on.

Anyway! Read the book! It's good!

A Deepness in the Sky (a book review post)

Wow, it's been a whole year since I reviewed A Fire Upon the Deep. If you remember back to that book, I said I was only going to read this one if it was better, and it was better, better enough that I wanted to know what happened even though I had some major issues with the book going in. And this one was slow, too, but not quite as slow as Fire. But let's just cut to it...

The first major issue with this book is that it's barely related to the first book in this "trilogy." Vaguely. Like, there's a character... Well, it's like going to a party somewhere and meeting someone who is your very distant relative through marriage. Or, maybe, two marriages. Like, you know, the divorced spouse of your fourth cousin twice removed. That's how related this book is to the first book. They're both set in the same party, um... universe, but there's really no connection other than that.

Which is probably part of why I liked it, because I thought the first book was, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't also have a strong dose of stupid, the main one being a star that turns itself on and off. Yeah, like it has a switch, except that it's on a timer. So for a couple of centuries, it's a faintly glowing dwarf somethingorother, then it will flare to life and burn bright for 50 years or so then go back out. And, somehow, there's life on the planet that orbits the star, highly evolved life, that has adapted to this pattern, something we're not even going to touch, because the problem is the star.

There is no explanation offered for this. It's just some mystery of the universe. Or, maybe, it's an alien artifact. Whatever. We don't care enough to try and find out, and the author doesn't offer any kind of rational explanation for it. Because, you know, physics, and physics doesn't allow for something like this, so the author didn't bother other than that it enabled the plot he wanted.

Look, if you're going to make up some piece of stupid shit like this for your story, you need to at least offer some kind of explanation as to why it exists. Well, unless you're Lewis Carroll and your whole book is full of the absurd.

The next major issue I had was the aliens. There's a problem with aliens in sci-fi and that's that almost always the aliens turn out to be just humans in costumes. Metaphorically speaking. The aliens act like humans, think like humans, pretty much are humans except for the fact that they look some other way, though, frequently, they're also based on bipedal symmetry, just like humans. I have a philosophical difference with this approach to aliens. BECAUSE THEY'RE ALIENS! If they're aliens make them act... I don't know... like... ALIEN! In some way! Make them different other than just cosmetically. Vinge completely fails to do this with his spider creatures.

Look, I get it: Aliens are hard, but at least make the effort. Rather than make the effort, though, Vinge makes excuses and tries to pass it off as the humans (in the book) anthropomorphizing the spiders as they learn about them, and that does work for certain sections of the book BUT there are clearly sections where the humans have no relation to what's going on with the spiders, and the spiders still act just like humans. He barely ever mentions the fact that they extra limbs. It's like they're just hanging around useless... like they would be if it was a human in a spider costume.

For all of that, though, the story was interesting enough to keep me involved, which says a lot about it considering the fact that I came into it with the idea that it needed to do something right away to get me to keep reading it. Mostly, that had to do with the characters, which were much better than the characters in the previous book. I especially liked Sherkaner Underhill; he's probably the reason I kept going at the beginning.

Actually, there are a lot of good and likable characters in this, just don't get too attached to most of them. Vinge is a bit like George RR Martin in that respect. They are all the characters who must die to prove the situation is serious. Or they all could be, and you never know which ones will make it through.

The book is also incredibly topical from a political standpoint, and that part I found very interesting. The political conflicts among the spiders, with their truth-denying conservative faction undermining the more progressive scientific community is somewhat engrossing. It wouldn't have surprised me if dogmatic religious spider had started saying, "Climate change is a hoax." That narrative is definitely worth a look considering the current status of American politics.

But is the book, as a whole, worth reading? I don't know. I would just skip the first one for sure if you think you might be interested in this one. Since this one serves as some kind of "prequel" for the other one in that it happens chronologically first, it might even be better to read this one first. But, really, unless you're just into hard sci-fi, I would give these books a pass. I'm not going on to the third book (but, then, it's the actual sequel to the first book, and I didn't like any of those characters, and I don't care what happens "next").

Last note:
Having said all of that, I do have some ideas about how this book relates to the first book in a more substantial way, but there's no way to verify any of it; it's all speculation on my part and, although it would be neat, it also doesn't matter, not to the story. Maybe if there's ever a fourth book and Vinge pulls all of these threads he's left lying around together, maybe, I'll read that one; otherwise, I don't plan on reading anymore Vinge.

A Fire Upon the Deep (a book review post)

Sometimes, there are those books that you really just expect to love. Or, at least, to like a lot. They have all the things that you generally like in books. Or, at least, for that type of book. By all accounts, I should have really liked A Fire Upon the Deep, but it never really took off for me. You could say that it got stuck in the slow zone, especially considering it took me something like six months to read.

It's not that I hated the book, but it never achieved likability. It was like one of those foods you're willing to eat to be polite but, really, you'd just rather not. Like asparagus.

The first issue was the characters. Not that they were the first issue, exactly, but you can forgive a lot of stupid stuff in books (or on TV or whatever) if the characters are good. Good meaning that you can relate to them in some way and empathize with their situation. Or negatively empathize (as with an antagonist). But this book had zero characters with whom I could connect, so I never came to care about what happened to any of them. The only character I came even close to liking got killed not long after he was introduced.

And it was difficult to actually dislike the "villain," since it amounted to no more than a program.

So not only did I not have anyone to root for, I also didn't have anyone to root against, so there was nothing really compelling within the story to keep me wanting to read it.

Some would say the book is about the world building, which is extensive, but I didn't find that appealing, either. There were too many things that I found, well, just dumb. Like the galaxy having "zones." Not zones like you'd have on a map, but zones like the layers of a rain forest: floor, understory, canopy, emergent. The problem with these zones in the book (unthinking depths, slow, beyond, transcend) is that they were represented somewhat like evolutionary stages. Earth is in the slow zone but, once man had evolved enough, he moved up to the beyond, except it's the technology that's evolving, not man.

The problem with all of that is that the technology cannot actually physically exist (work) in an incorrect zone. Imagine it like this: You grow up in a kind of rundown neighborhood and all you have is a bike, but you work hard and save and, eventually, move to a better neighborhood and buy a house and a car. Let's say that one day you want to visit your old home, so you decide to drive by and see it just for the sake of nostalgia. The only problem is that when your car enters the old neighborhood, it quits working. It just shuts off. You could still put it in neutral and push it around the streets, but that would take a very long time and be a lot of hard work. Or you could build a bicycle mechanism into your car that you could switch to when your engine cut off.

I don't find this kind of thing fascinating to ponder, not in any way. It's a ridiculous approach to physics and the universe.

And not to spoil the ending, and I'm not actually going to tell you what happens, but you shouldn't read the next bit if you want to remain in the unawares:

It has a totally deus ex machina ending. That's not a problem in-and-of itself, because you know from the beginning, basically, that that's what they're looking for. However, when it happens, it goes all in and offers absolutely no explanation. The ending just happens. They show up and everything that is going to happen happens without them doing anything other than being there. And that, also, doesn't quite make sense, but there is no explanation offered. It was unsatisfying, to say the least.

And that was after the six-month slog to read it.

Probably, I will go ahead and read the next one, A Deepness in the Sky, but that's because I already have it. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother. And when I say I'm going to read it, I only mean that I'm going to start it. If it's not better, I'm not going to force myself through it like I did this one.

Note: This is one of the author's I decided to explore several years ago when I was doing the fiction to science thing for a-to-z. Vernor Vinge came up with the idea of the technological singularity, and these books deal with that. So, yeah, sometimes I read a book I'm not enjoying so that I can understand the impact of it (like Snow Crash, which was horrible, but, after reading it, I understand why people became so enthralled with it (hint: It wasn't the writing)). Trust me, it's not some weird sadomasochistic reading urge. I just want to understand the cultural significance of the thing.

Clone Wars -- Season One

I've watched more than my share of sci-fi on television, not all of it very good. Some of it downright bad. Some of it, like the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so horrible that there's no legitimate reason it should ever have been allowed to continue. Star Wars: The Clone Wars is not one of those shows. The Clone Wars, in fact, is good sci-fi, even in its first season. It "suffers" from only two things, at least in the minds of most people:
1. Its connection to the prequels.
2. It's animated.

Seriously, in this day and age, why do people still belittle "cartoons." It's not a cartoon, okay. Quit calling it that. And, really, when you say, "I don't watch cartoons," in reference to, say, a Pixar movie or a Studio Ghibli film, you just sound dumb and/or weirdly prejudice. The Clone Wars is in the same realm. Sure, it's "targeted" at kids, except that it's not. Really, it's just produced to be "kid accessible," but kids are not necessarily the target audience. The target audience is anyone who wants a more fleshed out view of the Star Wars universe.

As for its connection to the prequels, you just need to get over it. My gosh, they happened. Get your collective heads out of your asses and grow up.

So The Clone Wars does flesh out the Star Wars universe, and it did it on an ongoing basis for six years. For me, the best part of the series is seeing the relationship between Obi-Wan and Anakin develop. From just the movies, you don't get to see the bond between the two and just how strong it was, so, unless you can fill in the gaps yourself, you fail to grasp the trauma for Obi-Wan when Anakin turns to the Dark Side and he's forced to confront him. I think most people failed to grasp that simple concept. The Clone Wars allows you to see and experience the brotherhood of the two men.

The other thing The Clone Wars does really well is explore just what it means to be a clone. A product. Within that, what does it mean to be an individual? What is the importance, the value, of one clone? Or, more appropriately, one person?

What I'm saying is that The Clone Wars explores real questions and looks at real issues and puts those things in a context that pretty much anyone can understand. It's no mere cartoon. The first season is strong. It didn't need time to "find its legs," as so many other, especially sci-fi, shows do. This series should be a must watch for any Star Wars fan. Any real Star Wars fan, at any rate.

However, as good as it is, there are still some episodes I like, I'll say, less well. Only two, though, really. You can see the reviews for those two:
"Blue Shadow Virus"
"Mystery of a Thousand Moons"

Picking a favorite episode from the season is much more difficult. For instance, I love half of the episode, "The Gungan General." The parts where Anakin and Obi-Wan have to work with Dooku to escape the pirates are some of my favorite moments of the season, but, then, they are countered in this episode by it being the absolute worst usage of Jar Jar in the entire series (or, at least, season one, but I think it's true of the series as a whole).

But, fine, I'll pick one! I'm going to go with
"Storm Over Ryloth"
as my single favorite episode. As I said in the review, I highly recommend it.

Next week, we start season two! I hope to see you there, and, remember, you can decide to participate in this blog event at any time. Just go here to sign up!

The Sparrow (a book review post)

As I've mentioned before, I am not much of a re-reader. It doesn't matter how much I like a book, I'm very unlikely to go back to it. There are just too many books I've never read for me to spend time re-reading things I've already read. However, as soon as I finished reading The Sparrow, I knew that one day I would read it again. I actually kind of just wanted to re-read it right then. But there was a sequel, so I opted to go that route instead. That was many and several years ago, that first reading, and I have finally gotten around to that re-read. I'm happy to announce that it holds up, which is always the worry when re-reading a book, that it just won't hold up to a second reading.

I think the first thing to point out about The Sparrow is that, for a science fiction book, you probably won't find it in the science fiction section of any bookstore. Generally, The Sparrow is found in the literature section (or whatever they call it now), which is--I want to say impressive, but that gives the wrong impression--abnormal for a book with aliens and interstellar travel. I'm going to say that this is because the book is not about the science fiction; the science fiction is just the stage for the true story, the story of a man and his faith.

So, while there is a voyage through space, the real voyage is spiritual. And I've probably given the wrong impression about what this book is about at this point, because it's not some book of Christian ideology. It's a book that asks questions, hard questions, and doesn't really know what to do with them or how to answer them. It never falls back on "God works in mysterious ways." I really appreciate the book for that. And it's not going to give you a bunch of "answers" at the end, either. There's no "trust God and it will all work out" pat on the back, and I appreciate it for that, too. To put it another way, this not a book preaching a bunch of Christian dogma.

It's not a "Christian" book at all, in fact, not from that perspective, anyway. It's not telling you the answers to all the questions of the universe. It's more asking those questions for you. Or, maybe, asking the questions you thought you weren't allowed to ask. Then it leaves you to figure out what you think about them, which can be a lot more uncomfortable than you might think.

This is one of those books that really speaks to me. It doesn't shy away from all of the crap that life can give you, and it certainly doesn't say, "Well, if bad stuff is happening to you, God must be punishing you." And I really want to talk about the specifics, but I'm not going to, because I think you should go read the book. This is one of the few (three, in fact) books that I think everyone should read. Everyone should have the opportunity to confront the questions The Sparrow asks and figure out if they're going to try to figure them out for themselves or shy away from them or pretend they don't exist.

The structure of the story only adds to everything else that's going on with the book. You follow the main character, Emilio Sandoz, through two different time lines: the trip to Rakhat in the past and the investigation into the trip in the present. It generates one of those situations where you know, ultimately, what happened, but you are rooting for the characters, anyway. You want to know "what" and you want to know "why." It's much more gripping than if the story had been typically linear.

That said, this is no lightweight book. It has humor, but it also has pain. It has enlightenment, but it also has darkness. It has great joy, but it has greater suffering. This is not a Harry Potter "This is great!" recommendation. It's not an amusement park; it's a mountain. But the journey, and the requirement of the climb, is worth it in the end. If you can make the climb. And I do get that not everyone can and not everyone wants to (it's hard work) but, probably, you will not regret it.

There's a good chance that in another five or seven years I will read it again.

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!

My Science (Fiction) Life (an Indie Writers Monthly post)

I had just left my computer to go sit on the couch with the dog. Actually, I was going to do a bit of reading, but I have to give the dog her time, first, because she jumps on me as soon as I sit down. It had only been a few moments--I know because my computer was still "on" (the monitor hadn't yet gone to sleep)--when my computer shut off. Completely. So did my wife's and the old computer that barely works that my son was using. In fact, there was a sound of the house powering down. A kind of whirring noise that then shut off. Yes, the power had gone off.

To find out what happened next and to read my science fiction love story in honor of Valentine's Day, hope over to Indie Writers Monthly!

Why You Need Your Sci-fi

"Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real." -- Jules Verne

Go read the rest of the post at Indie Writers Monthly.

After Earth

So, yeah, I know. After Oblivion, why would I want to and watch After Earth?

Either it was some weird form of masochism or it was Will Smith.
Actually, it was Will Smith and all the bad stuff said about his son because of the movie. I needed to see, okay! Sometimes, you just have to know, like when someone says, "This tastes awful! You try it," and you do. You're thinking, "Surely, it can't be that bad," but, then, it is, and you get mad at the person offering you the taste even though he told you it was going to be bad.

And, wow, After Earth was bad. So bad.

And, you know what, I'm not even going to talk about the stupid science in this movie.

I lied.

In one of the most ridiculous scenes I've ever witnessed in a movie, Cypher (Will Smith) gets up from his seat and places his hand against the interior hull of the spaceship he's in. He goes to the cockpit and tells the pilots that he feels gravitons and wants to know what's going on. This is like saying, "Hey, I feel some neutrinos; what's up with that?" Anyway, there's a field of asteroids nearby, and, sure enough, when they check, they find there's a sudden buildup of gravitons happening, and Cypher tells them to be careful because the asteroids might suddenly explode. Predictably, the graviton levels start to drop... just before the asteroid field spontaneously explodes. Because that's what asteroids do when they're sitting around in space; they spontaneously explode. The ship is forced to crash land on Earth, abandoned by mankind 1000 years prior.

Cypher and his son, Kitai, are, again predictably, the only survivors of the crash, but Cypher is badly wounded, which sets up the contrived scenario where Kitai has to go trekking across the planet to get to the other part of the ship to fetch a homing beacon. He has to trek across the planet on which "every living thing has evolved to kill humans." Oh, and climb an active volcano. No, wait, I don't just mean active; I mean actively active. As in, it's in the process of erupting. Because that's such a great idea. And I won't even go into the part where he has to fight the alien that they brought along with them, another thing that has evolved or been engineered "just to kill humans."

The very first thing that happens to Kitai when he leaves the one end of the ship is that a spider crawls on him. But this spider that has evolved "just to kill humans" doesn't hurt him. And, of course, none of the plants hurt him. But here's the thing: 1000 years ago all of the animals on Earth were basically the same as they are now. 2000 years ago, they were basically the same. 5000 years ago, they were basically the same. 10,000 years ago, they were basically the same. Yet, 1000 years in the future, all of the animals have evolved "just to kill humans." And we see some significantly different animals, like some kind of saber-toothed tiger, on this future Earth. And, I'm sorry, I have to call "Bullshit!" How about adding some science to your science there.

And I'm not even going to go into the physics involved in a bird no bigger than Kitai flying off with him. I'm just gonna say "bullshit!" again. I'm also not going to go into how the entire planet freezes over every night and, yet, remains lush and green. I don't even have a word for that, because bullshit doesn't cover it.

Now, I haven't seen The Happening, but I do know what it's about, and After Earth struck me as nothing more than a bad sequel to a bad movie. Another low for M. Night. The bad thing here is that Will Smith brought Shyamalan into the project, not the other way around.

So, yeah, the original story idea was Smith's, but it involved a car crash in the woods in which the father is injured and the son has to go for help, and he should have just stuck with that story. But he decided he wanted to go sci-fi with it, so he hired a guy who wrote a script then went to Shyamalan with the script who also worked on the writing of the script and what Smith ended up with was a disaster that should have crashed in the woods and been left there.

I mean, not only is there no science in the science in the sci-fi movie, but they stripped out of Cypher Raige (yeah, really? he needs a name like "Raige"?) everything that makes Will Smith an enjoyable actor. Cypher is nothing more than the stereotypical emotionless military character out of touch with his son. Of course, Smith didn't want the movie to be about him; he wanted it to be about his son. This was to be the movie to give Jaden a foothold into his own career of action stardom.

And that's the second reason I wanted to see After Earth. I liked Jaden in the remake of Karate Kid, but he got slammed pretty hard for his performance in Earth, and I wanted to know if it was justified. After watching it, I'm not sure. Based on his performance in Karate Kid, I'd like to say his performance in Earth is due to bad directing (because his father certainly delivered one of the worst (possibly the worst) performances of his career), but it's hard to know with only one other movie to compare against. He certainly didn't help the movie any, though, and his scene where he stands on the cliff and yells at his father through his communicator was almost painfully awful. But I really want to give him the benefit of the doubt and blame it on Shyamalan, who hasn't made anything watchable in over a decade. I guess we'll just have to see what happens. Assuming Jaden Smith gets another chance. A movie that crashes and burns as hard as this one did can kill a career.

Comic Shop Girls

Way back a long, long time ago, a girl in a comic shop was... I can't even say it was rare, because it just didn't happen. I mean, it was almost the equivalent of a sign of an impending apocalypse. And, if you believe in apocalypses (apocalypsi?) the way Joss Whedon does, maybe they were signs of various impending dooms all headed off by some special group or another. At any rate, it just didn't happen. I didn't know a single girl that read anything beyond Archie comics (or the equivalent) until my mid-twenties, like almost two decades ago.

Let me make it clear that I had had pretty extensive experience in and around the comic's industry by that point. I started collecting comic books during middle school. All the way through the end of high school, I never once saw a girl in the shop I bought comics at except for the one time I took one with me, and, although she agreed to go, it was more out of boredom than anything else, because her other option was to hang out at our church alone (not alone, alone; there were adults there, but there were no other teenagers). During college, I worked in a comic shop, and we had no female customers. At all. Ever. The only girl that ever came in was the girlfriend of one of my friends and only because he always trapped her into it. Then, I had my own comic business and worked in another shop, and neither place had any female customers.

The last shop I worked in in Shreveport (while also running a kind of sub-business under that shop (yeah, it was complicated, but it increased the owner's circulation, so he was good with it)) had a total of two female-type people that came in with any regularity. One of them was a girlfriend of a guy that had been one of my students (this was my last year in Shreveport, and I wasn't teaching at the time), and she always looked like she'd rather be at the dentist, especially since one of the other employees, Mark, would always try to hit on her while her boyfriend was busy talking comics. Yes, I do say that he tried hitting on her, because he never actually quite succeeded. He just made her uncomfortable and followed her around the shop as she tried to avoid him. The other was an "older" woman (to us) around 50(?) that actually played Magic and came in for tournaments. She sort of creeped everyone out, especially since she often "went home" with Boogie (and, yes, he had earned that nickname), and, if you can't figure out that euphemism, there may be no hope for you. That was it...

Until The Day...

It was a Wednesday, and I was shelving the new comics for the week (I was in charge of comics and CCG stuff), and a girl walked in. Alone. Not a mom (okay, she was a mom (of a not-quite toddler), but she wasn't a mom looking for a gift), not a girlfriend, just a girl walking into the comic shop. Alone. I took note of her, but I was busy, and I kept doing what I was doing. However, one-by-one, every other guy that worked in the shop made his way over to her and asked her if she needed any help. Every one of them: Mark, Rick, Scott, Tony. She turned each of them down, browsing through the comics until she made her way over to me and asked me if I could help her. Hmm... and that's a story for another time. Anyway, her ex-boyfriend (the father of her child) had been into comics, and she's picked through them occasionally, so she was looking for some suggestions about comics that she could get into. After listening to the types of she was into, I suggested The Sandman and Strangers in Paradise. She became our first (and only) weekly female customer, coming in to see what new comics were in and trying things out every now and then.

Flash forward to last week. I was sitting in the local comic shop (editing and reading) waiting for a Magic tournament to start up. At one point, I glanced around the room and noted the number of -- hmm... my wife doesn't like it when I call them "girls," although I'm certain some of them must have still been in high school -- young ladies that were hanging out in the store. I mean, hanging out on their own because they wanted to be there. There was one that was definitely a girlfriend, but the other more-than-half-dozen were obviously there because they wanted to be there. Some were playing Magic, one was browsing the comics, there was even grandmotherly type that was obviously looking at things for herself rather than looking for a gift (yeah, you can tell the difference when you've been in the environment). I was struck by the difference a couple of decades had made. Sure, it was still 80-90% guys, but, two decades ago, it would have been 100% guys.

I mentioned it to my wife, and she noted to me that there are a lot of guys that are against girls being in this kind of environment. It's like some group of 10-year-olds with a clubhouse and big "no girls allowed" signs stuck all over it. No girls in comics. No girls in gaming. Of any kind. Evidently, girls shouldn't play Magic and the certainly shouldn't play video games. According to these guys.

Which brought up the whole SFWA thing that happened a couple of weeks ago where a group of male sci-fi writers was proclaiming how writing science fiction is no place for women.

And I just don't get it. I mean, I really don't get it.

Maybe, this is me thinking as a retailer (from back when I did that), but the goal, then, was always to try and figure out how to open the doors of comic books to girls. It was an ongoing thing with Marvel (and other companies, but Marvel talked about it the most) in the late 80s through the mid-90s: How do we get girls interested in comics? And I was all for that, because, well, more business. So this idea that girls don't belong there is really puzzling to me.

And, well, my favorite sci-fi book was written by a woman: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. And you can't discount The Doomsday Book, a more than excellent sci-fi novel also written by a woman: Connie Willis. I'm sure I could go on, but I don't think there's a need.

At any rate, the idea that some of these things are "boys' clubs" just doesn't make sense to me. Why would that be so? I never had a "no girls allowed" clubhouse as a boy; maybe, that's because one of my main playmates as a kid was a female cousin; I don't know. One of my best friends was also a girl; we started kindergarten together and went all the way through to the end of high school, the only person I did that with, and we're still friends, today (well, you know, the kind of friend that only speak to each other every few years, because you don't live anywhere near the other person, but, still...).

And, well, despite the fact that I did a lot of what were pretty exclusively "guy" things when I was younger (like comic books and gaming), I would never have even thought that girls shouldn't be there, because, hello, I spent most of time hanging out with guys, and having some girls around would have meant, well, having some girls around.

So I don't get the attitude that women shouldn't be involved in gaming or comic books or science fiction. Or politics or science or math. Or whatever. I'm glad to see that there are girls hanging out in the comic store, and, after my wife told me about all of the hate that women get online about that kind of stuff, I'm glad to see that the dudes in the store seemed totally at ease with the fact that there were girls. I mean, there weren't lines of guys trying to hit on them or pick them up. They were just part of the environment, like everyone else. Maybe, there is some hope for the future.

I hope...

How To Win at Magic: Part 2a: Building the Deck

As I mentioned last time, the first thing you need to be able to win at Magic is Magic, but I guess that's really kind of obvious. Still, I felt like the point needed to be made. Basically, in a lot of ways, anything has the potential to be "the next big thing." Richard Garfield only developed Magic because he was trying to sell some other game. Rowling was just trying to make ends meet when she wrote Harry Potter. George Lucas thought Star Wars was going to be a flop because sci-fi had been out of fashion for over a decade and no one cared. Still, they all had a vision for what they wanted to achieve with their separate projects and worked to make those visions as close to reality as possible.

But, now that we have Magic, what do we do with it? [I suppose, really, some explanation as to what Magic is and how it works is probably in order, but that would be a whole other blog post and I still couldn't get all of it in, so I'm not doing that. Let's just say it's a card game (a CCG (collectible card game), as they used to be called; the first CCG, in fact) and leave it at that. If you want to know more about how it works, you can look it up.]

Building a Magic deck is a lot like writing. No, really, it is. Sure, it's nothing like writing in that there is no actual writing involved, but there is that level of construction that is very similar. You could say that the cards are like words and the colors like genres. So let's get some basics down. There are five colors of magic in Magic that each use a specific (basic) land type:

• white/plains -- life magic
• blue/islands -- mind magic
• black/swamps -- death magic
• red/mountains -- chaos magic
• green/forests -- nature magic

There are also some forms of colorless magic such as artifacts (machines) and some other stuff that was introduced after I mostly quit playing. At any rate, before you can build a deck (write a story), you have to decide what kind of deck (genre) you're going to build. Yes, you can mix colors (blend genres).

The basic building block of any deck is your land. You have to have land; it's where the power for your spells comes from, and you have to have the right mix of it to not get stuck not drawing any or drawing too much. This is rather like word balance in your story. There are some words that you just have to use, but you don't want to use the same words so much that your readers get tired of seeing it. For instance, don't start every paragraph with your characters name; that's like having too much land. The balance of your land mix is one of the most vital parts of making a deck.

Actually, this whole land mix, achieving the proper balance, could be analogous to any number of things in writing, so we'll just look at it as having your writing balanced properly for whatever it is you're doing.

I used to do a lot of helping people build decks, and the most prevalent issue was not enough land. There was this one kid that couldn't ever win a game, and I mean never, so he brought his deck to me for help (a black deck). For one thing, he played with about 80 cards (sometimes more), which was too many (but more on that in a moment), but he only had about 15 lands(swamps) in his deck. Land concentration is dependent upon the type of deck you're building, but, as an easy way of dealing with it, let's just say 1/3 of your deck needs to be land. He was playing with less that 20% land, so it was not surprising that he couldn't get any land into play and always lost. I upped his land count to about 22 and dropped his deck size to about 62, and, guess what, he won some games. However, the next time he came in, he brought his deck to me again and told me that it had "quit working" and wondered what had happened. Had he done anything to it? Only added in a few cards. So I took a look at it, and it was close to 100 cards, and he hadn't added any more land to it, so he was, basically, back down to that 20% land mix he'd had before. He was so stuck on using particular cards (devices) in his deck (writing) that he couldn't make it work. (I think this is not an uncommon problem for writers.)

Jumping back to deck size... the minimum deck size is 60 cards (except in some variations), and, generally speaking, you want to stick to something around that size. Your deck should be designed with a purpose, a selection of a few cards or card types that the deck works around with other cards to support that theme (you can think of those as your cast of characters, if you want). When you get too many cards in the deck, you can't depend upon getting to the cards you need quickly enough for the deck to do its job. There are, of course, exceptions in increasing deck size as long as what you're adding is still working toward your purpose and you continue to keep the deck balanced as you do it.

But let's say you want to break some rules. You're a writer, right? Who needs to follow rules? Oh, wait, no, we're playing Magic, so let's break some rules. One of the guys I worked with and I were discussing unique deck constructions one day, and I suggested making a landless deck. I bet even those of you that have never played Magic are thinking, "What?!?" at this point. Let me clarify: non-basic lands were okay, but many of those only give colorless power (mana), so it was going to be a stretch. So we talked it out, what specific cards would be needed, non-land sources of mana, cards that didn't require mana, that sort of thing. I helped him get a few of the cards that he needed, and he built the deck, and we tested it. He played it in the next tournament, and it was worth it for the shock value alone. People couldn't believe he had a landless deck. It was great even if he didn't win with it. Admittedly, it was a difficult deck to play, but it was a lot of fun because it was something different. So, yeah, sometimes, it's good to break with the conventions.

To recap, here are the steps to building a winning Magic deck:
1. Decide on your colors. (Choose a genre.)
2. Choose your theme. (This is like a plot.)
3. Balance!
4. Don't put in too many cards. (It clutters your plot and throws the balance off.) Likewise, put in enough to support your theme (or your plot).

And, now, we'll talk about the deck I became known for. Now, pay attention, this has all kinds of good lessons.

When we first started getting our cards, I was drawn to blue. Blue is about controlling what your opponent does, rather than simply pounding him until he's dead, and manipulating your own deck so that you can get cards faster. To put it simply. It was my first intention to focus on blue... BUT!

It was early '94 before we were really starting to get our cards, and, by that time, the first expansion, Arabian Nights, had come out. This card was in the set:

One of the guys in  the group looked at the card and said something like, "well, it's okay, but you couldn't build a deck around it," and everyone seemed to agree with him. He tossed the card on the table, and everyone dismissed it. Except me. I knew exactly how to build a deck around it, and, so, I abandoned blue as my color of choice right then and there and picked up red and green instead.

Red/green is still my color combo of choice (Not that I really ever play anymore. I probably haven't built a deck in ten years or more.). It's what I became known for playing, and it was the red/green deck I built around the Kird Ape (or variations of it) that took me to being the top ranked player in north Louisiana throughout 1994. Not that I didn't play other things, too, but red/green was my standard. And I never quit playing with the Kird Ape despite the monkey boy, ape boy, and worse nicknames.

The point here is that you shouldn't listen to what other people say can't be done. Everything is worth trying. Even building a deck with no basic lands was worth trying. Some things just take a little bit of imagination and effort. If you believe in something, don't let people tell you it won't work. Figure out how to do it. You might also just discover something you didn't know you'd like.

For fun, here are a few of the other cards from the deck:

The Taiga helped make the Kird Ape even more powerful. With an ape and this land in the initial draw, you could drop a 2/3 creature on turn one.

Once Legends came out, Blood Lust went into the deck. Potentially, you could hit your opponent for 6 damage on the second turn with this.

The Elven Riders was just for fun. It was one of my signature cards that I included in pretty much every green deck I played.

Palladia is one of my favorite cards ever. He's expensive, and, mostly, he'd just sit in my hand if I drew him; however, I never lost a single game when I got him into play.

NaNo: The Crazy Idea That Got Away

[Note: As I mentioned some time in the recent past (I don't feel like trying to figure out which post that was, right now), my wife is doing NaNo this year. It was kind of a spontaneous decision, but, then, that's how she often does things, and the best way to deal with that is to grab on and go along for the ride. To put it in writing terms, she would be the pantser of the family while I'm the plotter. Except that that's not quite true, but that's how it often feels and, probably, looks from the outside. At any rate, her decision to do NaNo was... well, I'll let her tell you about it in her own words.]

So I got a Kindle Fire for my birthday earlier this month. This was a present from my most excellent husband (the owner of this blog) and our kids. Some things to know about me and Andrew: We're not early adopters, ever; I'm actually kind of a Luddite (despite being a data analyst for a large corporation by trade); and we both grew up reading copious quantities of physical books. Thus this gifting of an electronic device on which books can be read is a big leap for us. But he made the leap, I think, because he's got a wife who does love to read and he just thought it would be nifty; also because after 15 years together he's still not really sure what kind of jewelry I like. [Actually, I wanted to get her something that she would use and enjoy on a continuous basis, and, as much as my wife likes the idea of jewelry, she rarely wears it. And she's always complaining about how the books I want to keep take up too much space, which is a valid argument for the size house we live in.]

I was both thrilled and intimidated by this gift. Thrilled because it's for books! and intimidated because, it seems, you can do a lot of other stuff with this device, like play games. Or surf the web. Or check email. Or...I'm not sure, it may even have a ray gun inside it somewhere. And I sort of hate to figure out new devices and how to use them (see Luddite, above) and determine how much money they will cost me in an ongoing sense. (Though I admit that having a portable ray gun would probably be really handy, but I bet the per-ray charges are insane.)

After my initial moment of "whoa, what," I did do some exploring and found out a fabulous fact: Our local library system does e-book lending, and it's nearly as easy to do as just surfing Amazon and one-clicking on whatever you like (after you physically visit the library, pay your late-book fines, renew your card, and spend a couple hours surfing the library website looking for ANY e-book that isn't already checked out).

So yeah, after one-clicking, I ended up with a book titled No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. There's very little explanation for why I checked this book out, other than the fact that out of 1000 or so e-book titles in the library this was almost the only thing that even remotely appealed to me and was immediately available. (Seriously, I would have even checked out 50 Shades of Gray, but it was checked out AND had a wait list of 40+.) I wanted some instant gratification on my new e-book mechanism, and this was it.

Let me be very clear at this point: I did not check this book out because I seriously thought I wanted to write a novel. Ever. Especially not during NaNoWriMo this year.

See, this is a substantial difference between Andrew and me. He has always wanted to write fiction, and I have always known that I do not and will not write fiction. That's not to say that I'm not a writer and not a good one, because I actually am. In college I could easily write a substantial paper overnight, without revisions, and get a B or higher. (The fact that I could usually get away with such terrible procrastination is why my overall GPA wasn't generally great.) But nearly all my writing has been done in the service of completing school and then being competent at my job. (You wouldn't think that the job of data analyst requires good writing skills but it actually does. No one's better at a bullet-pointed list than I am.) I've never taken a class in creative writing, and I didn't study more literature in school than I was strictly required to do.

I started to read the book and it turns out the story of NaNoWriMo--that is, the history--really drew me in. Basically it started out as a ridiculous thing for a group of friends to do. No one thought that works of great genius or amazing craft would be turned out; rather, it was a crazy creative thing to do for the hell of it, together. It sounded like a lot of fun. [It also wasn't originally in November, which I found interesting, and none of thought that it would become what it has. I mean, they weren't thinking about the future of it at all. It was a "let's do this right now kind of thing that became a tradition and then became a THING.]

After the history of NaNoWriMo, the rest of the book was mostly about the hows of accomplishing such a ludicrous, wild goal in the space of a month. Which, to boil it down, is "keep going and don't stop." (Now you don't have to read the book, but it's actually a pretty entertaining and quick read and possibly helpful to anyone who struggles with their Inner Editor or with writing paralysis.) Chris Baty managed to make the task sound like something which even I, the non-writer-of-fiction, am up to.

The upshot of it is that somewhere in the pages of the book I became convinced that I might as well try to write a novel. I do have a lot of story ideas in my head. I don't know whether they are good story ideas, but according to Baty that doesn't really matter; it's OK to write un-original crapola and it's OK to not care about "getting published." It's OK to write pulp fiction with no redeeming social value or great-novel aspirations. It's even OK to suck at spelling and grammar, at least for this first draft. (Spelling and grammar are a couple of things I un-suck at with writing; however, I'm also aware that they don't encompass fiction writing. And I managed to misspell grammar both times I typed it just now, of course.)

So yeah, I haven't ever written any fiction, but I have these things going for me:

-- I am a well-educated and thoughtful fan of sci-fi so I can probably not hack it up too badly. That is to say, I can do better than Galaxy Quest levels of science and there will be no chompy-crushy things in the middle of my space ship.

-- I write extremely quickly.

-- Spelling and grammar are not an issue for me.

Oh, I guess I should say I'll be writing a sci-fi novel. I was planning on writing something that could be described as "dystopian near-future sci-fi" (nothing like Hunger Games, okay), but yesterday I decided to switch to something different. A new idea, just because it feels more fun. And Baty's advice in No Plot was to write something I'd enjoy writing, so I'll be going for something more space-opera. I'm tentatively calling it All Suns Go Dark. (That probably should have been "tentatively titling." I told you I'm no author.)

Wish me luck. I'll update in the middle of the month if Andrew lets me and I haven't thrown in the writing towel by then. Anyone else doing NaNo or something equally ridiculous right now?

[I do want to say that I have been trying to get her to write something for years. She does have good stories, and I envy her ability to write quickly, a skill I do not have. Assuming she is still working on this, there will be an update in the middle of November sometime.]