Monthly Archives: December 2016

December 24, 2016 · 5:03 am

They fed the moh-gwi after midnight. You won’t believe what happened next! (#SFWApro)

I think I’m getting the hang of those clickbait titles … GREMLINS (1984) is probably one of the best Darkness at Christmas movies, as amiable Hoyt Axton buys a strange, adorable creature for son Zach Galligan’s Christmas. The seller was quite specific about the rules — don’t feed “Gizmo” after midnight, don’t get him wet — and when the family break them, all hell breaks loose. The eponymous monsters wreak havoc on the small town, brusquely wrecking property and killing people without regard to whether they’re good or bad; can Galligan and sweetie Phoebe Cates (man, does she look baby-faced here!) save Christmas? This was originally even darker according to the director’s commentary (next year I may buy the DVD instead of Netflixing so I can listen to the whole thing), a straight-up horror film. It works in the (slightly) lighter tone and it’s rife with movie references such as a shot of the time machine from The Time Machine (1960) and clips of It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. I’ll make the minor demurral that making Keye Luke the keeper of the Moh-Gwi seems to be the same sort of Mystic East orientalism as in Doctor Strange. All rights to poster image reside with current holder. “And that’s when I learned there was no Santa Claus.”

Rewatching drives home how very differently SCROOGE (1970) approaches the story from the Alastair Sim Christmas Carol; where the 1951 film constantly shows Scrooge in isolation, this sets the bitter miser against a backdrop of bustling, cheery crowds. I don’t think this works as well as sim, but it’s still a favorite of mine and impeccably cast, including John Gieldgud as Marley, Dame Edith Evans as Christmas Past and Kenneth More as Present. “If you were in my will, I’d disinherit you!”

LOVE THE COOPERS (2015) has my respect for squeezing in pretty much every Family Christmas drama possible: parents Diane Keaton and John Goodman are divorcing; Olivia Wilde’s bringing a pretend boyfriend home to prove she has it together; and Marisa Tomei struggles to compete with her supposedly perfect sister. This worked for me as a talking lamp — the cast is certainly good — but I can’t blame the critics who loathed it. “My mother knew before I did.”

MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET (1949) is the only good version of the story (there are three official remakes, plus Whoopi Goldberg’s Call Me Santa borrows from it heavily) about an amiable department-store Santa (Edmund Gwenn) who insanely believes he’s the real deal, which is obviously impossible, right? John Payne plays the lawyer who has to defend Kris Kringle’s sanity in court; Maureen O’Hara is his oh-so-sensible love; and Natalie Wood does a very good job as the child learning to believe in Santa (as O’Hara says on the commentary, you can see her reacting to what’s happening, not just making faces). “You’re no more qualified to practice psychiatry than a dentist is qualified to remove a gall bladder!”

RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER is, of course, the TV classic that turned a song about a reindeer with a luminous schnozz into a Christmas perennial involving misfits, snowstorms, dentistry and the abominable snowman. I’m less devoted to it than to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, but it has its charms. “Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

Among the multiple Rudolph sequels I know of (Hooves of Fire, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July) we have RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER & THE ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS (2001) is a computer-animated sequel in which Rudolph worries being idolized for his nose still leaves him a misfit; however when the sinister Toy-Taker begins collecting all Christmas toys for some secret agenda, Rudolph has to put his own issues on hold to save Christmas again. This does a surprisingly good job capturing the look and voices of the original, but at feature length, it’s quite padded. And the writers can’t pull off a musical number to save their lives. “Won’t anyone fear me—please?”

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December 23, 2016 · 4:00 pm

Parties for Christmas, Sex for Dinner: the week in review (#SFWApro)

So last weekend was the writer’s group Christmas party. It’s the fourth year we’ve held it, and I really enjoy doing it. We don’t entertain much, so this is easily the biggest social event actually held at our house.

This year, due to TYG’s intense work schedule, I decided not to ask for her help unless I had to. I didn’t have to, other than a couple of minor things, but that did add a lot more to the cleanup and prep. Fortunately I knew from the writer’s work day that my chili was a big hit (credit goes to the veggie chipotle sausage and Penzey’s southwestern spice blend) and chili is both simple, easy and scales up. Plus cornbread, toffee bars and chocolate chip scones. So I did most of the cleaning Thursday, then the shopping and cooking on Friday.

The party was great (photo by William Stolley, all rights remain with him). We had lots of guests, lots of tasty food, and good conversation. The party ran until around 12:30, and included a game of improv though I passed—my brain was getting a little worn (I’m so not a night owl) though I was still having fun. There was talk about writing, day jobs, politics, holiday plans, family members …And this time we let the dogs run around, which they thoroughly enjoyed, as did everyone else. And nobody accidentally fell over them, stepped on them, etc., which has always been our worry.

Best of all I could talk because I wasn’t losing my voice like last year. I did come down with an unpleasant sore throat midweek, but I took good care of it (lozenges, fluids, hot baths) and it seems to be mending without getting really ugly. Sunday TYG had things to do so I pretty much crashed at home with the pups. Much nicer than spending Sunday morning in Urgent Care last year.

And then the work week began. This week’s big accomplishment was completing the proofing of Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast. While I intend to give it one more look-see next week — some of the changes were extensive enough I could easily have introduced new errors — in every other way the text is done. What remains is finding a cover image, which hopefully I can manage next week. I’m going through Draft2Digital for this one (I tried Smashwords for Philosophy and Fairytales; let’s see how they compare) and they require a cover photo. There’s certainly no shortage of free photos on the web, but I need one that’s suitable for a Bond book, which will take thought. Haven’t thought enough yet.

But getting the body of the book done still pleases me much. I wasn’t sure I’d manage it.

I also went over the various notes people gave me for the beta reading of Southern Discomfort. I’ve discerned some broad, consistent criticisms, which I’ll blog about next week; there’s also lots of individual points only one person made, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth considering (some of them I already know are).

My work schedule was slightly off this week: TYG was out a couple of nights, so I tried working the evenings, then taking off in the morning after. This turned out to be fairly productive, except the dogs got very needed — they’re used to play, play, play for a bit in the evenings after TYG comes home, and expected me to substitute. And because doggy day care is full up with holiday boarders, we only took Trixie in this week (because of Plushie’s back, we want him boarded in his own separate cage, and they had none). He was surprisingly quiet and laid back when left to himself.

Oh, and Now and Then We Time Travel went to the printer on Wednesday. Soon, very soon, it will go live …

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Filed under Nonfiction, Now and Then We Time Travel, Personal, Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast, Southern Discomfort, Time management and goals, Writing

December 23, 2016 · 5:10 am

Insults in the real world (not exactly a guest-blog post, but …)

So recently right-wing hack Milo Yiannopoulos (of the doom of the sexbots theory) had a speaking engagement at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which included singling out a trans student by name and belittling her for not trying hard enough to pass. This generated some comments in a recent post on the Slacktivist (I don’t remember the specific post) which I thought were worth reprinting. Names removed, as I don’t know if they want to be quoted.

“I’ve been thinking about this since seeing and reading about Milo’s attack on the transgender student t’other day. He asked during his talk if they couldn’t cope with his insults how would they cope in the real world? And this kind of gives the game away about the objectives of the “alt-right”. For all its talk and self-praise about being dynamic and young and fresh and new, the core concept is not merely conservatism, which allows for change albeit very, very slowly, it is regression. This isn’t “the real world”- in the real world if you deliberately and repeatedly insult someone they will probably respond with insults or go somewhere that you’re not. They will not stay and allow you to subject them to those insults without at least trying to get you to stop.

What the “alt-right” is asking for, essentially, is for society to regress to a point where it was possible to pick out and pick on weaker members and bully and harass them as much as you liked with no consequences. They want to be able to turn the world into a school playground where the teacher is distracted, so they can pick on the weak without fear of consequences. He explained that what he was saying was “just a joke”, as always, and mocked the idea of “harmful words”. This is disingenuous. The man knows what an insult is, he writes them for a living. He is aware that insults exist. If there is no harm in them, then there should equally be no problem in ceasing to use them- they have become useless for the purpose they were created if they are incapable of wounding someone, so their requests that he stop saying them should be no more harmful than his saying them in the first place. Instead that’s an attack on his freedom of speech, a brutal attempt to suppress him, all the tyranny of all the world’s powers are turned against him when Twitter bans him etc.

If the insults are meant as insults, which they are, then he has to be aware that words are capable of harming people, because that’s the very purpose of an insult. This “it’s just a joke” argument is bullshit as a deflection, and the claim that you need to learn to deal with it because that’s “the real world” or “real life” is equally bullshit- it is not how the real world works, and even if it was surely the left is acknowledging that by trying to change it?”

“This is not how the real world operates. If anything, the real world is way, way, way, way the opposite. Try saying something even mildly offensive to a co-worker (let alone a superior or customer) and you will see how quickly you have a meeting with HR. They claim to be against safe spaces and for freedom of speech, but the reality is that the working world consists of nothing but safe spaces and the most anti-free speech areas.”

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December 22, 2016 · 5:05 am

Retromania and Specfic: the burden of the past (#SFWApro)

So earlier this year I read Retromania, a book on how our culture doesn’t seem to break with its past the way it used to. The 21st century hasn’t produced any radical new styles compared to punk, jazz or rock, and kids these days aren’t rejecting everything more than a few years old as hokey old crap. Author Simon Reynolds focuses on his field, music, but I think it’s also true about movies and comics. And then I started wondering, how do Reynolds observations apply to specfic?

Probably quite a bit, though not reading massive amounts of current stuff may be skewing my judgment. But it really seems like a lot of what’s popular is a continuation of what become popular in the 1990s (urban fantasy and the first steampunk fiction) or even earlier. Lovecraftian horror, for example, goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, and now it’s a subgenre (to which I’ve contributed).

And if there’s any genre that’s not around now, no problem. With ebay, Amazon or the used book stores on bookfinder.com, or the out-of-copyright stuff on Gutenberg, there’s nothing that’s not available somewhere, and possibly quite cheaply. Which is good — I was quite happy to read The Night Land on Kindle for zero cost— but I wonder what effect it has? Reynolds mentions that older stuff actually outsells new music, even though stores don’t keep the same backlist. I’ve heard other music-loving bloggers grumble that buying stuff made by dead artists is cutting into the money that goes to new artists, the ones who actually need it. Does the availability of all the old books affect how new fantasy and SF sells? Certainly my reading choices were influenced for years by what was available in local used-book stores.

What about race and gender? Obviously the roles women and minorities got in, say, 1930s SF, turn off a lot of modern readers. Then again, there’s no shortage of people who insist the genre was better before it took diversity into account. What difference does it make that they can so easily find books from an era when people didn’t take diversity into account?

To paraphrase Reynolds, if we assume the same number of brilliant specfic novels come out every year, then less than 10 percent of the 21st century’s best books will come out in 2017. Does that increase the chance of our reading older stuff instead of newer stuff?

What about stories that knowingly mine the past SF, fantasy or other genres? I’ve lifted from the hardboiled style for No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, from PG Wodehouse for The Wodehouse Murder Case and from 1950s SF for the Applied Science series. As one comic-book writer put it once, if all you do is mine the past without creating anything new, what’s the next generation going to mine? Not that I don’t think I’m creative and imaginative, but still.

Then again, perhaps I’m exaggerating. Sure, people still write Lovecraftian stories (probably more than his imitators and admirers did when he was still alive) but it’s veered a long way from anything HPL would have recognized, like an anthology of Lovecraftian romance (cover by Ignacio Cariman, all rights remain with current holder). Perhaps even if we’re not creating startling new genres, the variations on a form are significant. And certainly things like adding more gay, female and non-white protagonists is not a small thing, even if the story is otherwise working solidly within a classic subgenre and its formulae.

I don’t really have a conclusion to draw here. But I do find the questions interesting, even if I don’t have good answers.

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December 21, 2016 · 5:07 am

Not Being the Chosen One: Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (#SFWApro)

Jack Kirby’s Bronze Age series, Kamandi, Last Boy on Earth (cover by Kirby, all rights remain with current holder) is a good comic — heck, after Kirby’s “Fourth World” books wrapped up, this and Eternals at Marvel are the only Kirby work I thought was any good. But it’s also interesting to look at for (though I doubt intentionally) having a protagonist who’s not in any sense a Chosen One.

Kamandi was a riff on Planet of the Apes, a post-apocalypse world where homo sapiens existed as animals while the former animals ruled. Not just apes but tigers (a civilization modeled on ancient Rome), rats (running a crime ring out of sunken NYC), lions (a relatively advanced society in the Southwest) and dolphins (aquatic civilization, of course). Kamandi grew up inside “Command Bunker D” (hence his name) with his grandfather, sheltered from the world. Until a wolf raider penetrated the bunker and killed his grandfather. Now Kamandi’s out in the world, endlessly moving, looking for people like himself (it turns out there are a few), helping out where he can.

What made me frequently dissatisfied with the book as a kid was that Kamandi was often a passive participant in his own book. He’d run into trouble — giant gorilla, rat kidnappers, leopard pirates — but most of the time someone else would get him out of it, such as the lion Sultan or the human mutant Ben Boxer. Kamandi was the lead character, I wanted him to be more of the hero, and he wasn’t. Though I noticed when I reread the series a few years earlier that he does more than I thought at the time: in one issue he averts a bloody battle between tiger and gorilla forces by convincing them to resolve things with a game of chance. But generally he’s a POV character rather than a hero.

Rereading the series, though, that’s part of what I like about it. Seriously, he’s a teenage boy trapped in a world he never made (as the old Howard the Duck catchphrase put it), it’s not surprising he’s out of his depth. He’s courageous and resourceful, but it works for me that he’s only able to make small changes here and there. He’s not the Chosen One destined to remake the world and restore humanity, nor the hero who triumphs over the world through sheer awesomeness, he’s Everyboy. It’s quite refreshing (and I say that despite liking lots of heroes who change their world through sheer awesomeness).

I think this helps explain why the world often seems to real. Even as a kid, I got the impression these animal communities existed before and after meeting Kamandi: sure, meeting a talking, intelligent human cub was weird, but it wasn’t the defining moment of their existence, it was a colorful story they’d tell the family over dinner. The world didn’t revolve around him, so it had more space to be a world.

I really appreciated this after Kirby left (#36 was his last issue) and other writers took over. The strange animal cultures stopped feeling real: they existed purely to be a menace to Kamandi and didn’t feel like they had any other existence. Some of the animals started seeing Kamandi as an existential threat that might lead to humanity reclaiming the world. The final issue launched an arc that would have established Kamandi as indeed a Chosen One of some sort (the book ended first). In general, it was just not as good.

So there is something to be said for not being a Chosen One or a mighty hero, but as my younger reaction to Kamandi shows, that often works against reader expectations. Which doesn’t always generate a favorable response. Most of the Kirby run is available in reprint so pick it up sometime (if you have the money to spare, they’re hardback reprint collections and not cheap) and see what you think.

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December 20, 2016 · 6:48 am

Another new and column—

Equality is Awesome is live on And Magazine. I look at how desirable equality is, and why it’s actually a centrist, mainstream, moderate position. And why, even given that, some people can’t stand it.

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December 20, 2016 · 5:05 am

Covers I like (#SFWApro)

Saturday we had the writers’ group Christmas party, and I’m not completely back up to snuff. So here are some covers to make a post. First a weirdly psychedelic one from Kelly Freas. As you can tell from the yellow block, only the seventh novel out from DAW books.

Another Kelly Freas for DAW. #82 this time. Striking, though heavy on the eye-candy aspect (see the pretty girl helpless before the male gaze!).

Artist unknown. I quite like this one, and it captures the odd feel of the book well.

And now a couple of comics covers. First a creepy one by Neal Adams

Then a monster cover by Dick Dillin, who did a lot of DC’s better monster covers in the Silver Age.

All rights to all covers and images reside with current holders. I should be back to posts with more words tomorrow.

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December 19, 2016 · 11:47 am

Stupid arguments I see on FB

And sometimes in the media:

1)It doesn’t matter that Russia may have hacked our election! We’ve interfered in lots of countries’ elections!

By that logic, if we were nuked it wouldn’t matter because after all, we’ve nuked other nations. Yes, it’s true we’ve put up authoritarian puppet governments and rigged elections in other countries, and that isn’t good—but the ideal should be “we don’t mess with theirs, they don’t mess with ours,” not a universal era of tampering.

2)Any variation of a geographic defense for Trump’s win: He won more counties than Clinton, which proves he really won the popular vote. Clinton wouldn’t have even won the popular vote without California so it doesn’t really count. The places where Real Americans live picked Trump.

I heard the same thing after Bush lost the popular vote in 2000. He won more of the country so that proves he appeals to more diverse people. Al Gore only won in big cities which are teaming with liberals and immigrants and not real Americans who are simple, plain-spoken folk living out in rural areas. But guess what, “popular vote” is not measured by geography, it’s measured by the number of voters. And the fact a lot of Clinton’s (or Gore’s) support came from a smaller geographical area doesn’t prove she’s less popular or that Trump’s support is more diverse. All it proves that relatively sparsely populated areas have outsized clout in the electoral college. Which, of course, Republicans are delighted with; it’s just that they still object that big cities and big states have outsized clout in the popular vote. In particular they object to the simple, obvious fact that the Republican candidate is massively unpopular, lost the popular vote and had a miserable electoral college showing.

Which is one reason to keep reminding them that it is so. Reality, as they say, has a liberal bias.

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December 19, 2016 · 5:28 am

Identity politics, retraining and more: political links

Blaming “identity politics” for Trump’s success is bullshit, FAIR says. Okay, white male identity politics was very important in Trump’s rise, but the critics of identity politics are talking about everything else. It’s Democrats championing blacks, women, Latinos, Muslims that cost them the election, and not because the other side were bigots, it’s because identity politics is bad. Except the white kind; to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, white identity politics is always assumed to be justified.

A piece at the Guardian sums it up well (I may have linked to it before): blaming “political correctness” for Trump is like blaming Jim Crow on the civil rights movement. Identity politics and “PC” are about fighting back against people who deny those identities equal rights. Take wedding vendors (bakers, photographers) who don’t want to cater gay weddings, which the right wing holds up as the symbol of oppression in our times. Possibly some people are outraged by that who were fine with gay marriage and gay rights in general, but an awful lot of the anger comes from people (Ted Cruz, for instance) who didn’t think gay rights were acceptable to start with. As the FAIR piece points out, there’s no point in compromising because the goalposts are constantly moving. As blogger Roy Edroso once put it, gay-haters used to blame their attitudes on how offended they were by the leather boys and kinksters flocking to gay pride marches. But it turns out when two gays want to put on matching tuxedos or wedding dresses and pledge undying love, the gay haters don’t stop hating.

And the Niskanen Center says (long but worth the read) you can’t fight for liberty without identity politics. And The Guardian on the myth of Political Correctness as defined by the right.

•Right-wing Republican theocrat Franklin Graham (who thinks Target not separating toys by sex is terribly wrong) thinks people working in manufacturing and construction are right to resist retraining to become, say, computer programmers — there’s no pride in being a computer programmer. So it’s not surprising they appreciate Trump fighting for their jobs (okay, saying he’s fighting for their jobs). So as someone quipped, when minorities turn down jobs it’s because they’re lazy; when white people do it, it’s because they have pride, dammit!

That said, computer programming isn’t for everyone. As one blogger (I forget whom, alas) put it some years ago, if the only way for anyone to get a job was to retrain so that we could work in construction, that would be bad, even if retraining was free. Some people wouldn’t be physically up for it. Some people would hate it. Some just don’t have the right mix of skills or traits (trust me, any job that involves working off the ground would leave me too terrified to move). Same thing. Not everyone’s going to fit into computer programming. And besides, those are jobs that can be outsourced, or that companies can hire capable immigrant programmers for. So I don’t think it’s a cure. But arguing that there’s something sub-par about the jobs and that they’re just not as manly as Real Work? Give me a break, Mr. Graham).

•Several courts have ruled that police can’t force you to give them your phone passcode—but now one court has said, yes, they can.

•Trump wants to know the names of everyone in the Department of Energy working on climate change. The DoE declined.

•For years, Republicans freaked out about Obama being a secret Muslim and a foreigner despite a complete lack of evidence. Now that we have tentative evidence Russia tried to swing the election for Trump —hey, they don’t care! Some of them are, however, outraged that Kellogg’s is no longer advertising with Breitbart.com.

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Filed under economics, Politics

December 18, 2016 · 5:16 am

Silverblade, Harley Quinn and more: Graphic Novels Read (#SFWApro)

SILVERBLADE by Cary Bates and Gene Colan (cover by Colan, all rights reside with current holder) astonishingly has never been collected in trade paperback, but as I recently reread the series, I’ll review it anyway. The protagonist is Jonathan Lord, once a Hollywood legend, now an embittered, elderly recluse — until a mysterious spirit taking the form of the Maltese Falcon gives Lord the power to become any character he has ever played on screen. Once again, he’s the young, handsome Prince Silverblade, except when he’s the battered boxer of Fight City, the Robot Executioner of Beware Behemoth Beach (not a career high-point) or Dracula. But what is his mysterious benefactor’s real agenda? Where a lot of comics with mystical New Age elements founder in the mysticism, Bates never loses sight of the characters — why DC hasn’t reprinted this, I cannot fathom.

HARLEY QUINN: Hot in the City and Power Outage by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner bring us the ever wacky adventures of Harley Quinn as she becomes a Coney Island landlord, dodges a stream of contract killers, shows Poison Ivy her beaver (“Oh. An actual stuffed beaver.”) and becomes Power Girl’s crimefighting sidekick. This reminds me of a lot of DC humor books from the late Silver Age, where you can almost feel the writers desperately trying to be funny when they’re not — which is to say, this book sinks like a lead balloon (with a few exceptions, such as the Power Girl arc). And the wackier the creators try to get, the more it sinks.

After the crappy Red Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl becomes fun again with The Crucible, in which a mostly new creative team makes Supergirl likable again and gives her an interesting supporting cast, fellow trainees at the eponymous school for galactic super-heroes. Unfortunately it was too little too late, as this was the last gasp for the series. And even given the improvement, it still suffers from the same discontinuity problem as previous volumes: the first chapter culminates in Brainiac and the Cyborg Superman attacking Earth, then we forget about them until the Five Years Later one-shot that wraps up the collection. That sort of thing doesn’t help.

THE OMEGA MEN: The End Is Here by Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda aspires to reboot the 1980s ET super-team for a grittier, more realistic story of their struggle against the conquering alien Citadel. And for most of the way it succeeds, but the “realistic” ending is so stock (I won’t spoil it, even so) that it retroactively killed my liking for the rest of the series. And while the original team were stock characters (the badass, the sneak, the wise leader, the tormented outcast) at least they had characters — here they feel closer to chess pieces being moved through the plot. And “name” guest-star Kyle Rainer (at this point apparently he was White Lantern—he’s been bounced through so many roles it’s hard to remember) is implausibly passive in all this (again it feels more like he’s being positioned as human POV character than an actual person).

ELFQUEST vol. 3 by Richard and Wendy Pini as very good as the Wolf-Riders and the dwellers in Blue Mountain attempt to figure out just what makes a true elf — what path are elves supposed to follow? Complicating things is the scheming Winnowill and a dark secret in the Wolf Riders origins. A book that’s more about character and culture than epic adventure, but no less fascinating for that.

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