May 16, 2012
Dress Your Marines in White
Murder in powdered form. What a life.
May 9, 2012
About Fairies
Some things happen whether or not you clap your hands.
May 3, 2012
At the Foot of the Lighthouse
I am American. We are all Americans.
April 25, 2012
Prophet
Some men are born monsters. Others made so.
I know that’s a strong claim for children’s cartoon on the Disney Channel. But seriously, the show about two brothers who spend each day having an insane adventure, their sister Candace, who spends each day trying to bust them, and their pet platypus Perry, who spends each day thwarting the mad schemes of the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz, is one of the best depictions of science fiction on television today.
The Avengers, opening May 4th, represents something rather historic for movies, a crossover team-up. While fairly common in television and comics, crossovers, characters from two or more series meeting, rarely happen in films. I can think of only a few examples, and they all involve horror movie villains meeting and fighting (and two of them have “Vs.” in the title).
If you’ve read Terry Pratchett’s books before, then all you need to know about Snuff, the thirty-ninth Discworld book, is that it’s the next Sam Vimes novel, it is about as good as the last Vimes book, Thud (2005), and if you liked Thud, you’ll like Snuff.
If you haven’t read any books in the long running fantasy/satire series before, then you should know that Snuff is an entertaining parody of Agatha Christie-esque mysteries, set in a world where the oppressed underclass are in fact goblins. Series mainstay Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, has been forced to take a vacation in the country and stumbles on a conspiracy of smugglers, slavers, and murderers.
The humor is sharp and the characters are charming, and the plight of the goblins creates moments of genuine pathos that are the highlight of the book. However, the central mystery lacks tension, and the book relies too much on audience’s previous familiarity with Vimes, which means that while I enjoyed the book, I wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s first trip to Discworld.
In the wake of X-Men: First Class, there’s something that needs to be said, and repeated.
Professor Xavier is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.
Okay, both have a dream of a better world for their respective repressed minorities, a future where minority and oppressor co-exist as equals, but that’s where the similarities end.
King was a pacifist who refused to use violence, even to defend himself. Professor X, on the other hand, trains his teenage students to be masked freedom fighters who beat the crap out of anyone, human or mutant, who threaten the lives of mutants.
No, Professor X’s belief that mutants have the right, and sometimes the need, to use violence to defend themselves makes him a lot closer to, appropriately enough, Malcolm X.
True story: after Batman Begins came out, my mom called and asked, “Steven, in the real story of Batman, the Joker killed his parents, right?” To which I replied, “Well, first, we’re going to have to talk about what you mean by ‘real’…”
On May 31st, DC Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee, with DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, dropped a bombshell; in September, DC Comics is revamping their entire superhero line. All fifty two comic books they publish will be the first issue of a new series, featuring redesigned and updated versions of their familiar characters. Additionally, every superhero comic will be available digitally on the same day as the physical book (Archie Comics is the only other publisher who has done that so far.)
Reaction in the online comics community has been mixed. Some have welcomed the change. Some have declared DC Comics dead to them, seeing the renumbering, redesigns, and digital availability as a snub to the loyal comics collector and the direct market retailers (comic book shops). Most have reacted with snark, calling out the reboot as a sales stunt, one DC has done before; most famously in 1985 with Crisis on Infinite Earths, again in 1994 with Zero Hour, and relatively recently in 2006 with Infinite Crisis: launch a slew of new titles and goose sales of ongoing ones by promising “jumping on points” for new readers who don’t need to know decades of continuity.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) is not science fiction in the usual way the superhero films are. There is no godlike alien wandering around Earth, nor a man in a robot suit.* The Dark Knight is, instead, a psychological science fiction movie about an extreme, impossible mentality, obsessively driven to tear down civilization, and how the guardians of society try and fail to deal with him.
*Batman’s wonderful toys notwithstanding.
To be blunt, people like the Joker, brilliantly portrayed by Heath Ledger, simply do not exist in the real world. Yes, there are those who “just want to watch the world burn,” but the Joker is perfectly evil. There is no part of him the audience can identify with. He has no origin, no motive, and no objective other than the destruction of the very idea of society.
Batman has been a multimedia star since almost his inception. From comic to serial, to TV show to cartoon to movie, Batman, and specifically Batman’s costume, have been depicted by multiple talented artists and designers.
But there is one aspect of Batman’s costume that live-action takes always get wrong. Always, in fact, must get wrong, and that’s Batman’s cape.
BATMAN’S CAPE DEFIES THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.
By their nature as vigilantes, acting outside or above the law, most superheroes have a troubling undercurrent of aristocratic, undemocratic, authoritarian values. Only the hero, not the police, judges, lawmakers, and average citizen, can effectively protect and improve the city they patrol, and god help anyone who gets in their way.
No one exemplifies these tendencies more than Batman, the ultimate aristocratic hero.
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Naked Girls Reading founder Michelle L’Amour reads from Fahrenheit 451—Photograph by Beau Allulli, used with permission |
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Gigi LaFemme said as she approached the mic, “but I’m actually really nervous. So I’m picturing you all naked.” And the crowd erupted with laughter.
Because Gigi, like all of the women on stage upstairs at Madame X on Friday night, was wearing only high heels and body glitter. It was the New York premier of Naked Girls Reading, a salon reading series founded in Chicago earlier this year that has already spread to five cities across the US, and is about to make its international debut.
The concept is perfectly summed up by its title. At the beginning of the evening, seven women, six performers from New York’s Pinchbottom Burlesque troupe and special guest Michelle L’Amour, founder of Naked Girls Reading, walked on stage, promptly dropped their robes, and sat demurely on couches and upholstered chairs. One by one, each rose and read to the vocally appreciative audience from books they chose and personally loved.
Last year, Eisner award-winner David Petersen teamed up with Luke Crane, award-winning designer of the Burning Wheel roleplaying game system, to create an RPG based on Petersen’s comic Mouse Guard, about a medieval(ish) order of mouse rangers who protect their territory from the dangers of weather, predators, and other mice. Last month, the Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game won the 2009 Origins Award for best Role Playing Game and is nominated for three ENnie awards at this year’s Gen Con. With such high bona fides, I got the game book and four friends to give the game a test drive.
Like Petersen’s comic, Mouse Guard RPG seems simple at first but holds surprising depth. It is the first roleplaying game I’ve encountered (in my very limited experience) that really rewards its players for role playing rather than gaming. Mouse Guard is not a game of craps with a Lord of the Rings flavor. Mouse Guard is a storytelling experience that happens to involve a dice game.
Tra la la boom di ay, it’s Free Comics Day!
On the first Saturday of every May (not the be confused with May Day or First of May), the comic book publishers team up with Diamond Comic Distributors and comic book shops around the nation to provide free comics. Or let my friend Hugh describe it (as well as promote his indie-comics movie, opening today):
The official Tor.com Ten Guidelines for Attending Free Comic Book Day are:
1. Go to your favorite local comic book shop. Don’t settle for the closest one, go to the one you enjoy patronizing the most. They will almost certainly provide the best experience.
2. Bring a friend! Make a day of it. Bonus points if it’s someone new to comics. Double plus good if it’s your kids!
3. Go early. Most shops underestimate how many comics they actually need, and lines tend to form. Getting there when the stores open is not unheard of.
4. Go in costume. Break out that ill-fitting Spider-Man outfit from San Diego 2002 and squeeze back into the tights!
5. Loudly spoil the events of Legion of Three Worlds #4 while waiting in line.
6. After getting your free comics, take the time to browse the rest of the store. Many stores have sales in addition to the comics being given away, and you might find something else that catches your interest.
7. Read all of the comics! Yes, 99% of the comics are entirely promotional, and most of them will also be... of less than stellar quality. But some will be superb (last year, DC Comics gave away first issues of All-Star Superman, one of the best comics of the last decade), and you will never have a better opportunity to sample the breadth and scope of the field of comics.
8. If you find something you like, share it with others. Free comics are not meant to be bagged and boarded. They’re meant to be passed around like swine flu.
9. If you find something you really like, head back next week and pick up a couple issues or a trade paperback. Take this as an opportunity to expand your horizons!
10. ... I just though 10 was a good round number.
So have fun, bring your buddies, and I’ll see you there!
Dorian Wright and a collection of the blogosphere’s funniest writers create a collection of uncomfortable plot summaries, such as:
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
DIE HARD: Dysfunctional cop saves marriage by murdering foreign national.
Hi, my name is Steven Padnick, editorial assistant at Tor Books, and welcome to MATTERS / ANTIMATTERS, the new Tor.com/Suvudu joint venture!
With each installment, I will post about a topic of interest to the science fiction, fantasy and general genre community, and Kaitlin Heller, my… ahem, colleague at Del Rey, will offer a response on Suvudu. Or vice versa.
Today, I’d like to talk about that bane of internet discussions, spoilers.
No, not “one who seizes the booty,” but the revelation of a plot element, thus denying a potential viewer or reader the enjoyment of surprise and discovery.
While I am sensitive to the desire to approach each work of fiction as pure as the driven snow, so that each reveal and twist is felt as viscerally as possible, I feel that the mania to remain “spoiler-free” hinders discussion and promotion of genre work.
In a misguided attempt to make the Sci Fi Channel a “broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand,” the network is changing its name to a made-up meaningless configuration of letters that appear to be pronounced exactly the same as Sci Fi.
Discuss.
Edited to add:
Watchmen is not a particularly political story.
While its central question of unchecked authority does concern the role of politicians and governments, it is really about all authority figures, from abusive or absent parents to a cold and distant God. To focus on the political angle misses most of the story.
Which is why I’m going to be disappointed (but not surprised) when I read the following headline some time next week:
REPUBLICANS CLAIM WATCHMEN A CALL FOR CONSERVATIVE HEROES IN AGE OF OBAMA.
Today is Scott Pilgrim Day, the celebration of the (roughly) yearly release of a new volume of Scott Pilgrim, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s video game-inspired action-comedy-romance, and your intrepid Tor.com reporter was on scene at Jim Hanley’s Universe in New York City for the midnight release party to bring you the story (and to get his book signed).
On his blog, Neil Gaiman succinctly argues even something as “icky” as manga depicting sex with minors should be defended because, to protect the First Amendment, all speech has to be defended, even if it is on the surface “indefensible.” (He also neatly deals with the canard that banning deviant pornography in some vague way protects children from rape).
Gaiman is talking about defending smut in general. He alludes to, but doesn’t really explore, how deeply upsetting pornography has a natural home on the comics page.
Comics, like books and animation, but unlike film and photography, can tell stories of things that can not be (i.e. supernatural powers, alien worlds, mythical creatures).* That is well known. Less well explored is comics as a place for stories of things that should not be, things that would be illegal, unethical, or just plain morally reprehensible to do with actual actors and models.
Or rather, less well explored in this country. In Japan, pornography involving actual humans is very restricted, so much so that a large percentage of Japanese erotica are comics and cartoons (building on a tradition going back hundreds of years).
Scott McCloud drew a 40 page introductory comic for Google's new web browser, Chrome.
Winner: Fantasy Fiction
"Toads of glory, slugs of joy," sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words.
First, a cute puppy:
Okay, so, that's adorable, right? In a variation on the Cat Proximity Phenomenon, we are left with the overwhelming urge to say things along the lines of, say, "Oh, look at the puppy! Look at him pawing at the glass! He thinks it's another puppy. Oh, yes he does, yes he does!"
Ahem.
More to the point, the puppy vs. mirror video demonstrates an interesting issue for philosophy, psychology, and literature, the matter of self-recognition. A dog, looking in a mirror, sees another dog. How is it that when we look in a mirror, we see ourselves?
It's not because we know what we look like and can see it. We only know what we look like because that's how we look in a mirror.
We know the image is ourselves because the image behaves in accordance with what we do. We lift our right arm, the image lifts its left. We cut our hair, the image's hair is shorter. We do the hokey-pokey, it turns itself around. We watch the image long enough to learn it has no agency of its own, that we control its every action. That is enough for one to point to the thing in the mirror and say, "That's me!"
In this way, scientists at Yale taught a robot to recognize itself and its own reflection in a mirror. Simply, the robot measures if movement it sees corresponds with its own motors moving. If an object does not move simultaneously, it gets labeled "inanimate" or "animate other", and if it does, it gets labeled as "self." (The actual math is much more complicated, obviously.) The algorithm calculates probability over time, so that even if an object happens to move in time with the robot, unless the object keeps time perfectly and consistently, the robot can still tell the difference between its reflection and an imposter in as little as five seconds. Sorry, Harpo.
What's fascinating about this is that it allows the robot to make observations about itself and its relation to the rest of the world, using basically only visual input. (Video demonstration here). This is true even if the appearance of the robot changes (because the light is different, the robot is moved, the robot is damaged, the robot is wearing a jaunty Yale cap).
Okay, why this is fascinating is that what allows the robot to see itself in a mirror, is the same phenomenon that allows us to see ourselves in a robot.
If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, go see it. Now. Turn off your computer, tell your boss you're seeing a doctor, and find a matinee.
I'm not joking.
Wall-E, the titular robot, is one of the most human, likable, and relatable characters in film in years, which is pretty impressive for a trash compactor with a pair of binoculars stuck on top. He (and it's impossible not to refer to Wall-E as a "he") suffers and loves and jokes and imagines his future in a way that is immediately, intuitively understandable to the audience.
We can "read" Wall-E as well as we do because of the way he moves: his trembling hand as he reaches for Eve's conveys his longing; the way he balances a spork trying to decide if it belongs with the forks or the spoons tells us how he organizes his thoughts; the shudder that goes through his frame shows us when he's scared. As he ineffectively swiped at his treads hung on the wall, trying to "get dressed" in the morning before being fully recharged, I was pointing at the screen saying, "That's me!"
And then, having recognized myself in the image I saw, I could now make observations about myself in relation to the world. His world, the post-environmental collapse Earth and the consumerist mono-culture of the Axiom, became my world, and his problems became my problems. Moreover, Wall-E's optimism and sheer determination became positive example of how to respond to such problems, and I walked out of there certain I could save the world.
This is why we read science fiction and fantasy: to look at strange bodies in alien worlds and see ourselves in ways that mere reproduction could never achieve. A picture of myself would tell me nothing about myself. But seeing a little robot turn a hubcap into a straw hat tells me everything I need to know.
(Photo of "Nico" taken by Kevin Gold, used with permission. Wall-E © Disney/Pixar)
