Monthly Archives: December 2015

December 10, 2015 · 2:57 pm

Structure and Time-Travel: My Book (#SFWApro)

P1190170This month, I’m focusing almost entirely on Time Travel on Screen which is working out well. While I’d like more variety, my rewrite of the manuscript is coming along and as you know from my movie/TV-review posts, I’m getting a lot of stuff watched. And in the middle of it all, I’m thinking about the structure of the book (which is why I have Glinda of Oz reading a book—art by John R. Neill, all rights to current holder—as an illustration. Which is a flimsy reason, but hey).

My first film book, Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan had no structure. It was a straight A-Z list of movie synopses.

The Wizard of Oz Catalog (okay, now I think I’ve justified the illo) broke down the subject works into categories—original Oz novels, non-canonical Oz, movies, TV shows, radio dramas, stage plays—and then listed synopses in each category, though chronologically rather than alphabetically.

Screen Enemies of the American Way was different as I took a more thematic approach, looking at movies about German subversives, Japanese spies, pod people, fembots and other types of fictional fifth columnists. The synopses were worked into the text of each chapter.

(And don’t forget, there are links to where you can buy them and other stuff by me on the What I’ve Written page. Just sayin’).

Time Travel on Screen is closest to Screen Enemies, but the big difference it’s tougher to decide which chapter to include a given move in. With fifth-column films, it’s obvious whether the villain is a German, Japanese, Islamic or other bogeyman. But Terminator, for example, is both a love-across-time story (“I came here for you, Sarah.”) and a alter-Earth’s-future-history film, so which chapter? And how do I arrange the chapters so the book seems to flow logically (which is probably something nobody else on Earth will give a damn about but it matters to my aesthetics.

The current breakdown is as follows:

•Connecticut Yankee adaptations.

•H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, plus Time After Time and other stories where Wells is the time traveler.

•Travel from the present to other eras. For travel to the past, I’ve grouped it by era—visits to Medieval Europe, feudal Japan, the Victorian age, etc.

•Travelers from other times coming to the present. This one I’ve subdivided more by story idea — fleeing a pursuer, seeking breeders (several travelers from the future are looking for 20th century breeding stock, for example Terror From the Year 5000), making friends.

•Time travel to change the past.

•Time travelers from the future changing the present to alter their own era.

•Changing personal history—getting the girl, opting for career over marriage, etc.

•Time police.

•Love Across Time

•Family-themed stories (getting to know your parent when they were your age, for instance).

•Parallel world stuff.

And then there’s the appendix, which has all the little movies that don’t qualify for in-depth treatment (not that anything is really in-depth, but some have more than others). Would it give more depth if I clumped movies from the appendix in as short notes in the relevant subchapter (putting The 25th Reich in with other WW II History Altered films, for instance)? What about putting parallel-world love stories in the love story chapter? Which will be more satisfying and smooth for the reader.

First-world writer problems, obviously. I’m confident I’ll get it all figured out by deadline.

 

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December 9, 2015 · 8:16 pm

The Internet of Things and its discontents (and other links)

Yes, we could end up with everything in our homes interlinked and networked. Or with multiple incompatible devices that won’t work well together.

•A new paper argues that sure, we’re losing privacy due to big data, but think about the net benefits! Which is the same kind of techno-utopianism I criticized in this post.

•Tying both together, we have a hacker who got into a homeowner’s wifi by hacking the teakettle.

•Slacktivist reminds us that Elkader, Iowa, is named for a Arab Muslim warrior who defended Christians.

•A playwright casts a white guy as Martin Luther King on the grounds King transcended race.

•Right-wingers are screaming that the Oregon campus shooting wouldn’t have happened if more people had guns. Except the campus allows guns, and it still didn’t help (as detailed at the link, it rarely does).

•Is Trump a fascist? David Niewert (who writes a lot about the topic and knows a lot about it) says no, but he’s alarmingly close.

•Consumerist explains why Comcast’s “use more data pay more money” theory of data caps is not as logical as it sounds.

•Another Consumerist post, on the risk of feeding antibiotics to farm animals.

•A massive merger in the beer industry is a world of win according to the beer companies involved.

•Would you believe there’s a black market for stolen chicken wings?

•I recently linked to Erick Erickson saying his folks wouldn’t let him eat Asian food on Dec. 7. His mother says that’s not true. Erickson’s response: she’s old and doesn’t remember.

•So Abigail Fisher, a white student, applied to the University of Texas and didn’t meet their standards. But since some underperforming nonwhite students got in, she’s suing to overturn affirmative action, even though she wouldn’t qualify under a race-neutral policy. However the case has reached the Supreme Court and Justice Scalia thinks overturning affirmative action is a good thing, because stupid black people won’t be thrown into a college environment they can’t keep up with.

First response: affirmative action students don’t do that much worse than anyone else, on average (or so I’ve read). Second: where is all the concern for the underperformers who get in as legacy admissions (George W. Bush, for instance) or the students who get a bonus on their admissions because they’re in-state. Etc,etc. More at the link.

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December 8, 2015 · 1:28 pm

Third Doctor, First Season (#SFWApro)

Unlike the first and second Doctors, there’s so much Third Doctor streaming I figured I’d just review it season by season, rather than by serial (though I decided that after I’d already watched Jon Pertwee’s first story, Spearhead from Space).

silurians-cd1The remaining serials from Pertwee’s first season:

•Doctor Who and the Silurians.  Mysterious malfunctions at an experimental research station reveal the reptilian Silurian are tapping the power plant for their own use. They went into suspended animation millenia ago, and are none too happy that these pink-skinned apes have taken over their planet. Can the Doctor broker a peace? (all rights to image with current holder).

•Ambassadors of Death. The astronauts from Britain’s first Mars mission have been rescued from space … except when the capsule returns, there’s no-one inside. The astronauts are popping up all over London, killing with a radioactive touch—what’s behind it all?

•Inferno. While watchdogging an attempt to tap geothermal power from the Earth’s crust, the Doctor taps the system to jump-start the TARDIS. He materializes in a fascist alt.timeline where the same project is going on, the Brigadier and Shaw are part of the oppressive government, and the project is having all the bad effects the Doctor predicted. Can he get home? And will it be in time to stop the same catastrophe?

While I liked Troughton better on rewatching, I like Pertwee a little less. In him, the Doctor’s disrespect for authority seems more snide and less irreverent. I’m already two stories into his second season though, and he’s growing on me. As I mentioned discussing Spearhead, his stories are very much in the line of other British screen SF—Ambassadors of Death is particularly reminiscent of Quatermass. On the downside, that does give the season a formulaic quality when watched so rapidly: there’s always an arrogant head of research who insists everything is running fine and who the hell is this Dr. John Smith to start criticizing him anyway?

The Siurians tries a little too hard to wag its finger at warmongers. Ambassadors of Death is a good little thriller and Inferno is nicely apocalyptic, though the monstrous Primords are really poor monsters.

Season Two will be along in due course.

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December 8, 2015 · 1:14 pm

My new And column, the Japanese Internment and other issues

My New And column, on Ted Cruz’s claim that Christians never commit terrorism. And therefore Muslims, because of their innately terroristic personalities, deserve to be kept out, or profiled or locked up. In short, the massive surveillance-and-detention system Republicans have championed since 9/11 should be used on Others, never anyone Like Themselves.

•My previous column discussed how much the paranoia over Islam resembles the fear of Japanese that led to the internment. And wouldn’t you know, Trump refuses to say whether he’d have authorized it. Now, while that could theoretically be humility—”maybe I’d have given into the irrational fear too”—not saying anything like “Well if I did I’d have been wrong, just like FDR” would seem a logical thing to put in there. But instead he babbles about how war requires “tough choices.”

Well, yes. Like not giving in to fear and paranoia and bigotry (rather than saying we’ll kill their families). Which Trump does, and he continues to pull the Republicans more racist-ward (“to the right” seems inadequate). Which may be shrewd politics—the more racist he is, the more the spotlight stays on him.

Just to clarify things, no Japanese-Americans were ever convicted of espionage. There’s no evidence the internment hindered whatever spy networks the Japanese government might have had in place (despite wartime movies such as Little Tokyo, USA and G-Men vs. the Black Dragon in which it was the trump card that sent their network of fifth columnists crashing down). It was, however, overwhelmingly based on racism (all Japanese are loyal to the Emperor, there’s no way to tell a good Japanese American from a disloyal one) and paranoia (the very fact no acts of sabotage were occurring just proves they’re waiting to do something really bad!).

•That doesn’t stop Eric Erickson from saying with pride that his family marked the Pearl Harbor anniversary by not eating Asian food (at the link, the author points out that would include Chinese, Korean, Thai …).

•Erik Loomis points out that Hawaii, our casus belliin WW II, wasn’t exactly American territory— we overthrew the Hawaiian government and occupied it.

•Echidne looks at Trump’s call to ban all Muslims. Roy Edroso looks at the right freaking out over San Bernadino which is Totally Different from that not-a-terrorist at Planned Parenthood. Echidne looks at how the media balance the killer being a housewife with her terrorism.

•The Mayor of St. Petersburg bars Trump from the city until they can determine if he’s a threat.

•In addition to hating Muslims, it looks like no abortions for rape victims is going to be the new norm.

•Echidne looks at sexism on the right.

•Dubious claims about why college is so expensive.

•As we face the high probability of Hilary Clinton becoming one of the candidates, there’s a growing school of “we’d be better off in the long run with Republicans” articles because that would teach everyone how bad Republican governance is and pave the way for the triumph of the lest. Like Scott Lemieux, I cry balderdash. And Democrats are just as likely to run to the right, as they’ve tried doing in the past (another school of finger-wagging you’ve-blown-it-now posts).

•An initiative to add grocery stores in food deserts hasn’t worked.

•Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, now dabbles in revenge porn. Reason looks at the limits on anti-revenge porn laws. And former revenge-porn kingpin Craig Brittain discovers how Totally Totally Unfair it is to be haunted by your past online.

•Republicans wring their hands a lot about how nobody takes us seriously when we talk tough. But it’s also a problem if nobody believes us when we say we’ll do nothing.

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December 6, 2015 · 11:18 am

A couple more books (#SFWApro)

BLACK WIDOW: The Tightly Tangled Web by Nathan Edmonson and Phil Noto feels like the creators are shooting for the gritty tone of the Daniel Craig bond films, but they also replicate most of the stuff I dislike about Craig films—bland, forgettable villains and missions that don’t have much point. And because this is part of a long-running arc, the emotional aspects—Natasha becoming increasingly isolated—don’t pay off enough to interest me. Mediocre.
15766601THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies by Jared Diamond mercifully does not assume that we made a disastrous mistake when we left behind the hunter/gatherer lifestyle (“People today who leave traditional societies say there are multiple gains, such as better medical care, escaping constant violence and seeing fewer children die.”) or assuming that “traditional society” is a one-size-fits-all description. Diamond looks at the differences between modern and traditional and between different traditions to see how various cultures deal with war, assault, children (“In New Guinea I’ve seen a two-year-old playing with a nine-inch knife and nobody tries to take it away.”), trade and aging. Some of the chapters are canned (the difference between traditional and modern diet) and the recommendations often are too (talk to people in the flesh! Eat healthier! Slow down!) but the book is still thought provoking for showing that what we think is the normal way to live may not be (“Hunter-gatherer children don’t play competitive games or keep scores to determine winners—instead the games emphasize the need to share and cooperate.”). However it is odd how Diamond doesn’t touch upon gender issues, sex, marriage or love except in passing (the role of intermarriage between tribes affecting tribal feuds and wars for instance)—that’s a really glaring omission. Well worth the time, though (all rights to cover image to current holder)

 

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December 6, 2015 · 11:08 am

Inert and imprisoned:Doc Savage in The Motion Menace and the Submarine Mystery (#SFWApro)

5123036THE MOTION MENACE entangles a vacationing Pat Savage in danger by the same logic as Red Snow—the villains assume she’s traveling as Doc’s agent and decide to eliminate her as a threat. Fortunately for Pat, the plane that stops mysteriously in mid-air, then falls, isn’t hers, but she gets captured by the Elders, a bunch of old, bearded guys wearing overcoats just the same (she does manage to scam them effectively later in the story)

The threat then moves to New York, a mysterious force that can freeze traffic, crash planes, hold Doc paralyzed and even kills Monk’s pig Habeas (Doc revives him). The gimmick is the one thing Dent kept from the original ghosted story by Johnny Johns, rewriting everything else. As the title suggests, it’s an anti-motion ray, one that intensifies inertia so that the target freezes completely (a scientist explains at one point that while this doesn’t fit Newtonian theories about inertia, those theories are wrong).

The politics of the book are unusual in being, if not pro-Soviet, at least OK with the red menace. When Doc discovers one character is an OGPU (forerunner of the KGB) agent, that’s proof he’s a good guy; Doc has worked with OGPU in the past; and the villains’ scheme involves overthrowing the USSR’s current government. Admittedly it’s not for freedom and democracy—the bad guys plan to take over, tax the people, steal the tax money and then move on to other nations—but having Doc save the Soviet Union is almost as surprising as the hero of Drums of Fu Manchu trying to save Hitler.

A minor oddity is that we never learn why the group calls itself the Elders and dress up in those outfits. Was this Dent working a variation on the Elders of Zion (I can’t but notice one of the villains is that anti-semitic bogeyman, the international banker)?
THE SUBMARINE MYSTERY resembles Devil on the Moon in that 1938’s international tensions are a backdrop to the villains’ scheme rather than the root. It opens with a beautiful woman in medieval armor jumping off a sinking US sub … except the Navy confirms it’s not one of our subs. The villains have actually been building duplicate US submarines (improbably nobody notices they’ve taken over a Brooklyn Navy shipyard to do this) to commit international piracy. If the victim ships go down with all hands, it’ll be written off to one of the European or Asian belligerents (Germany blames Russia, China blames Japan, etc.); if it survives, the US will get the blame. In a nice touch, the villains’ base is an isolated island, but instead of the usual Lost Race, it’s just a place nobody visits very much. Their strange, archaic manner of speech is only the way the lower, more ignorant members of society talk.

Millennium Comics argued that 1938 was the year Doc began pushing back against the inhuman discipline he’d operated under most of his life, and this book makes a good case. Doc loses his temper with the female lead (admittedly he’s done that before, in The Roar Devil) and totally loses control when he catches some of the bad guys whipping a seriously ill boy to punish his father. He also spends at least half of the book as the villains’ prisoner—not continuously as in The Feathered Octopus, but escaping, getting recaptured, escaping, getting recaptured … It works, though. Both books this month work better than I remembered them.

Covers by James Bama, all rights reside with current holder.

4918692

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December 5, 2015 · 9:45 am

Men in High Castles, with spoilers (#SFWApro)

216363While webisodes and online-only movies aren’t mandatory for my book, I watched Amazon’s streaming-service Man in the High Castle (all rights to cover reside with current holder) because the Philip K. Dick book is an alt.history landmark by a name SF author. Amazon has thereby wasted several hours of my life that will never return.

The series is set in 1962, the US is divided between German and Japanese occupation, and the situation is tense. Hitler is aging and everyone anticipates the two former allies will be at each others’ throats when a new Fuehrer takes command. The resistance is fighting an apparently losing battle against the occupying forces. And the mysterious Man in the High Castle is trading the resistance valuable intel in return for smuggling various filmstrips to him—movies such as The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Allies triumph, or films showing Stalin still alive in 1954 (later than in our world).

The central characters are Joe, a resistance agent secretly working for the Nazis, and Juliana, who stumbles into the West Coast resistance after her sister gets killed. Both wind up in Colorado delivering films, fall in love, hide their true agenda, hide from a bounty hunter looking for resistance agents and then returning home, doing more resistance or counter-spy stuff, continuing to fall in love… all done without the slightest hint that anyone in this world has any fun.

That’s what makes the series unwatchable to me, ultimately. It’s as if the creators can’t imagine that anyone in the occupied US would actually crack a joke or get on with normal life.That can work OK in movies such as It Happened Here, but for 10 hours with a second season to come; one shot at the end of our regular Earth, brimming with life, just made me feel how lifeless the rest of the series was.

By contrast Dick’s book manages to be both goofier and funnier and more terrifying. One of the central characters, for instance, is an antiques dealer catering to Japanese who want authentic pre-war Americana… only what’s it to do when it turns out enough of his stock is fake to discredit him (I should note I skipped a couple of episodes of the Amazon series so possibly this guy does turn up). It’s funny and interesting. Or the minor detail that TV broadcasting in this world is years in the future (Berlin has just started mass broadcasting in Europe) or that pot is legal.

At the same time, because all this is taking place against the background of occupied America it’s creepier, because people really are getting on with their lives. Sure, that genocidal thing the Nazis did in Africa is horrifying, but oops, gotta go, I have an appointment!

And I like The Grasshopper Lies Heavy because unlike some alternate histories I’ve seen, Dick has someone get “what would have happened if the allies won?” wrong all the way across the board (FDR steps down in 1940, the US establishes a kind of world socialist state after the war ….).

That said, Dick’s philosophical musings get a bit heavy in spots, and the revelation/suggestion at the end that Grasshopper is in some fashion the true reality doesn’t make sense or go anywhere (I think the simplest explanation is that the writer’s cuckoo). It’s an early example of the incomprehensible weirdness of Dick’s last books. But this one’s good, and deserves a better adaptation.

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December 5, 2015 · 9:20 am

Mockingjays, detectives and Japanese generals: this week on screen (#SFWApro)

While I still think THE HUNGER GAMES: Mockingjay, Part Two (2015) could have been combined with the first film, I must admit it didn’t hurt the end product—it doesn’t feel padded the way The Hobbit did. And it doesn’t hurt to have Jennifer Lawrence showing she can handle anything from tragic loss to WW II-style morale-building Why We Fight speeches; Donald Sutherland as the malevolent Snow is also impressive in a more understated role).  Very good. “I’d have saved myself a lot of pain if I’d given that bread to the pig.”
SyFy’s FEROCIOUS PLANET (2011) neither entertains nor qualifies for the book as the parallel-world setting is just a random world with monsters, rather than an alternate history. John-Rhys Davies plays an arrogant senator in what’s presumably a Sliders shout-out, and Stargate: Atlantis’s Shephard is the dishonored military protagonist. “It didn’t feel like an earthquake it felt like we were—sliding.”
ZATHURA (2005) is the Jumanji copy-cat in which two squabbling brothers and their sister are swept up by the eponymous space-adventure board game and find themselves battling killer robots, killer meteors, killer aliens, etc. This is much poorer than Jumanji, as it has no actors comparable to Hunt, Williams or Dunst, and the setting doesn’t seem as natural for a magical game as the former film did. However various events in the story make it qualify for my book much better than the first film. “They turned the thermostat down to 48 degrees!”
RESISTANCE (2011) is set in the alt.history that follows from the failure of D-Day and the invasion of Britain,with a couple of women caught between the Nazi forces who’ve recently occupied their Welsh village and the British forces ready to punish anyone who collaborates. This didn’t work—it would double bill better with Went the Day Well (British vs. covert invasion) than an actual alt.history like It Happened Here. “A couple of weeks and it may be over.”

Having just finished the UK Life on Mars I wrapped up the sequel series  ASHES TO ASHES in which DI Alex Drake (Keely Hawes) found herself back in the past a decade after Life‘s Sam Tyler. While this started off blandly, it picked up second season as Alex began investigating whatever happened to Sam Tyler; in the third and final season, we find out and I must admit it’s not what I expected. This almost takes it out of qualifying for the book, but given it’s been presented as time-travel up to this point, it’s going in anyway. In it’s own right, too much a straight cop show a lot of the time to work as well as its predecessor. “Come on, you didn’t think this was a real police station did you?”

OdanobunagaAMBITION OF ODA NOBUNA was a one season anime series that takes the same premise as Battle Girls: Time Paradox: Yoshi is flung back to the age when the great General Nobunaga (art by Kano Motohide, all rights to current holder) united Japan under the shogunate, only to discover Nobunaga and the other war leaders are women. The explanation here is simpler than the previous show—first-born women are allowed as war leaders—but the time travel isn’t explained at all; unlike Battle Girls there are no time-paradox twists down the road, just Yoshi and Nobuna working to unify Japan (and overcome finding each other obnoxious and irritating of course) so I could skip a lot of this. In its own right, probably better done than the first show, though Battle Girls had a more impressive Nobunaga. “The man he gave his life for chose to die like a dog!”

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December 4, 2015 · 1:22 pm

Lessons learned this week (#SFWApro)

First, when I’m sick as happened last month, I don’t get stuff done (technically not a lesson learned as I already knew it). I hit about 50 percent of my November goals, which is a good deal lower than usual.

•My writing group is awesome. I read them the first chapter of Brain from Outer Space and the feedback was good. I’m hoping that actually committing to getting this one done will finally push my past coming up with plots that don’t work (I’ve had trouble ever since writing the Applied Science backstory series revamped my concept of the characters).

•I can get a lot done if I wake up early then nap later, but eventually I wear down. And stress (nothing serious, just accumulated little stuff) still keeps me up. On the plus side, we’ve trained the dogs not to lie on me when we go to sleep, so that’s going to help.

•Getting outside helps my mood a lot. Particularly if the pups aren’t with me.

•Having the Christmas tree up is a big mood booster to.

•I’m tired of hearing the same fricking Christmas songs covered by different artists. One reason I enjoy The Killers’ Red is that it actually has original Christmas songs. I’m also fond of the Scrooge musical soundtrack for the same reason. Still, I’ll be listening to Christmas music until the holiday is over. I like things Christmassy, possibly to make up for not having family to spend it with (due to geography, not death) for more than a decade before I moved up here.

Other than that, not much to report. I’ve been tired enough that it’s been almost all watching time-travel stuff this week. And not working on other stuff at the same time as much as I’d expected.

Still, any life that involves an adorable puppy can’t be all bad, right?

IMG_0585

 

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December 3, 2015 · 3:50 am

The Planned Parenthood terrorist and other links

Right-to-lifers are shocked, shocked and appalled that anyone would connect their “baby killers need to die” rhetoric with the Planned Parenthood attack. Digby has no sympathy for them. Echidne points out that in cases like that, people parse the motives (maybe he wasn’t after Planned Parenthood?) in a way they don’t do with say, the Paris attacks. More from We Hunted the Mammoth. Katha Pollitt says yes it’s terrorism and points out another double standard: conservatives who think Black Lives Matter contributes to police shootings and that all Muslims should feel responsible for Islamic terrorism insist there’s no connection between “abortion is the new Holocaust!” and people killing to save the unborn babies.

•Yahoo’s Internet business is doing poorly enough, the company is considering getting out of it altogether.

•What can happen when prosecutors go bad.

•The government allows water polluters to trade credits—a high polluter can pay for a low polluter’s credit bank, for instance. But as noted at the link, the program is flawed, and in businesses’ favor.

•Two California charities that accepted donated cars spent almost all the money on their own operations rather than helping people.

•Google allegedly breaks its promise not to spy on school kids’ online activities.

•You’ve probably heard about the company that jacked up the price of one of its drugs to $750 just because it could. Express Scripts is offering a comparable drug for $1.

•A plane crew refuses to allow a man to board his flight because, they say, they weren’t comfortable around him.

•Trump’s supporters are mouthing increasingly nasty views. Though nothing that surprises me. But you’ll be pleased to know Trump’s extremism is popular because of liberals, not Republicans. Because obviously the enthusiasm for Trump’s plan to crush the Middle East, take their oil and waterboard accused terrorists (if they’re not guilty, they had it coming anywhere) is because of Obamacare and food stamps.

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