Monthly Archives: April 2024

On Fictional Cursing

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Recently on the social media sites where writers congregate there has been a small discussion on the subject of invented curses. Should a writer just use the curses that everyone uses and is familiar with or invent new one for their fantasy and far-future settings.

Invented cursing like artificial slang is a very touchy thing to pull off. Those of us geeks old enough to remember the original run of Battlestar Galactica recall the programs invented curse words like ‘frak’ and ‘feldercarb.’ (I am not cure of the spelling of that last one.) Which were one-for-one replacements for ‘fuck’ and ‘bullshit.’

This ‘just replace it with an invented word’ style of fictional cursing misses the point and understanding of cursing. Cursing is transgressive.

Cursing is about violating the ‘good taste’ and decorum of your culture. It is shocking and emotionally powerful because it is breaking norms and rules. If all you do is change ‘fuck’ to ‘frak’ then in effect you are saying that this alien culture thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years in our history is just the same as ours today. Possessing the same values the same taboos and therefore the same sense of what is proper and polite.

That’s just lazy.

Plus, it misses the chances the golden opportunity for the writer to show us something about the new culture without stopping for exposition.

A culture with a lot of religion on its history or its current make up will have curse derived from that sense of religion.  No culture that doesn’t have some belief in torturous punishment through damnation is going to have the curse ‘damn you.’ If a culture places no important on familial bloodlines and lineages, then they are not going to use ‘bastard’ as an insult.

Star Trek’s Vulcan are a fiction race that prides itself on total control of their emotional reaction to the point that they insist that they have no emotions. Displaying and suggesting a Vulcan has displayed emotion would be an insult and transgressive. While they are not given to angry outbursts, I could see a Vulcan character calmly looking upon an enemy and saying,’ I have no doubt that gives you,” then with a pause for emphasis ‘joy.’ A stinging insult and rebuke delivered with a flat affectation.

So, think about the cultures your create and then ponder deep on what they consider transgressive and there you will find you curses and insults.

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Where the Alien Franchise Went Astray

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As I write this people across the internets are celebrating the 45th anniversary of the release of Alien, a science-fiction horror film that spawned sequel after sequel and nearly countless knockoffs and imitations.

20th century films

In my appraisal there are only two Alien films of quality, Alien and Aliens. James Cameron wisely decided when he wrote and directed the sequel to the original film that his was not to be horror but action/adventure with only tone of horror. With the conclusion of Aliens Ripley’s story came to an organic and satisfying end. Healed from her traumatic encounter with the Zeta Reticulian parasite and with a new composite family there should have been no more to tell for this woman.

Naturally the studios screwed that up and insulted the audience along the way.

With the next film, Alien3, a production that had a hard release date before it has even a story treatment much less a script, after abandoning such vaunted SF concepts such as wooden space stations crew by technophobic monks, the producers opened the story by killing Ripley’s new family.

The producers considered the audience suckers for investing any emotional energy or commitment to these characters. The lesson is quite clear. Nothing you care about matters. No victory is lasting, all happiness is fleeting, we bring you only despair. Is it really surprising that this production is the one that introduced sexual assault to the franchise?

The proper course after Aliens would have been to craft new stories about new characters. The bold and correct choice would have been to even abandon the parasite as the central threat. Horror repeated becomes adventure and further repeated become dull. This is of course not what the studio did, instead, reviving poor Ripley from her demise and adding scores of parasites in a futile attempt to create a sense of danger and dread where only lame action now existed.

Two ‘prequel’ movies have been produced, a pair of Alien vs Predator movies have squeezed a little more cash from the concept and this year, yet another movie will be released but everything after Aliens has been crap.

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Pleasantly Surprised

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Last week I returned to a manuscript I hadn’t touched in something like three years. My plans are to prep it and send it out to small press publishers of SF novels.

Naturally, I had to review it to make sure that I had the correct file and that there weren’t any major glaring embarrassing errors lurking in the text.

While I am tweaking a sentence here and there, just a really light edit, overall, the text is reading just fine. In fact, I find myself pulled into a story that I already know quite well. Not only am I not unhappy with the work I am quite pleased with it.

This may all be self-delusion. The creator is often the worst judge of the creation but three chapters in and I really am very happy with my writing.

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After ‘The End’

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Sometimes when a film has finished the credits have scrolled into history my mind ponders the next sequence of event for the characters. I am not speaking of sequel stories and further adventures but rather the immediate fallout of the events that just transpired.

67 years ago this week a classic of American Cinema was released to theaters 12 Angry Men, the story of a jury originally deadlocked 11-1 in favor of a murder conviction that grapples with prejudice and racism as they search for justice and their own souls. *spoilers* bit by painful bit the jurors uncover doubt in the prosecutions seemingly open and shut case until after conquering their own biases they reach an acquittal. The story ends with the jurors going their own way on a rain-soaked street as sunlight returns to the world.

I adore this film. Masterful writing, acting, and filmmaking in a tightly confined location. I do also ponder what the newspaper the next day looked like. The case against the young defendant looked so absolute, so solid. No one writing about the case or reading about would have been treated to the deep discussions and debate over evidence that in the public eye had seemed so certain and incontrovertible. I have no doubt that there would have been excoriating opinion pieces about an idiot jury that let a killer walk free, opinion pieces that might have proved quite popular.

Another movie that sparked fascination in what transpired after the final reel is the Cohen Brothers’ neo-noir Blood Simple.

A tale of lust, greed, and murder Blood Simple is a salute to classic film noir but one that isn’t like its predecessors constrained by the ‘Production Code.’

In the film one of the protagonists takes what he assumes is a corpse to a field to bury it. The person isn’t dead but gets buried anyways. Horrific. However, it’s not the gruesome nature of the killing that really set my mind wondering but rather the ‘hiding’ of the body. When I said it was in a field you might have imagined an open stretch of unused land, perhaps in a secluded forest. Nope. This is a farmer’s freshly plowed but not yet planted productive land. It’s a striking visual, the parallel lines of the plow interrupted by the stark unique rectangle of a grave, but what happens the next morning? I imagine a tired farmer ambling to his field to begin the daily work and stopping shocked at the sight of a grave in the middle of his future corn field. This ‘hiding’ isn’t going to last twelve hours as it’s almost certain that the county Sheriff is going to be involved very quickly.

It’s this sort of pondering that prompted me to write an epilog to my horror novel. Perhaps, if it sells, the editor will ask me to cut the epilog but I knew that had I read or seen my own story I would have been wondering how, with so many dead people scattered about the town, did the protagonist not spend the rest of his days answering very difficult charges.

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Another Movie Review: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

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This past weekend was a two-movie weekend and after seeing Abigail on Friday evening Sunday morning me and my sweetie-wife took in Guy Ritchie’s latest film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. (Henceforth referred to as The Ministry.)

Lionsgate

The Ministry is a highly fictionalized retelling of Operation Postmaster and early mission by the Special Operations Executive to degrade Nazi U-boat operations in the Atlantic. The supply vessel Duchessa D’Aosta carries vital equipment and provisions for the U-boats and because the ship is in a neutral Spanish harbor off the coast of West Africa a direct military assault could bring Fascist Spain into the war on the Axis side. Instead, a very small team of disreputable agents lead by Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) is sent in to destroy the ship at anchor. Operating out of uniform in in a neutral port if the teams is captured torture and death await them.

From its opening musical score and its poster art The Ministry is like a classic ‘Spaghetti Wester’ melded with a World War II action flick. The heroes all possess fantastic skills and preternatural cool. Plans go awry, the enemy is more skill and numerous that expected, schedules are disrupted and through it all March-Phillips and his team of Nazi killers remain steadfast, committed, and collected.

This is not a movie with deep social commentary or complex questions of morality, it is a romp, a fun couple of hours watching incredible competent men and women handle adversity and challenges in the manor of our fantasies. Aside from the theater’s sound system being way too loud I had a quite enjoyable time with this movie and as long as you do not go in with expectations of reality, I think you will as well.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is currently playing in theaters.

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Movie Review: Abigail

Universal Pictures

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From the creatives at Radio Silence that brought to life the delightful horror/comedy Ready or Not comes their latest bit of cinematic fun Abigail.

If you have seen the trailers, then you know the core concept: a gang of professional criminals kidnap a young girl in hopes of a massive payoff but discover to their horror that she is in fact a vampire and they must now fight to survive their criminal enterprise.

The film and the trailer, with their tongue pressed firmly into their cheek, makes liberal use of music from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake a nod to Universal granddaddy of Vampire films 1931’s Dracula which used the ballet’s themes as its score.

The film is led by Melissa Barrera as ‘Joey’ the most sympathetic member of the kidnapers and who displays the most concern for Abigail before they learn of the girl’s true monstrous nature. Joey contends for leadership of the gang against ‘Frank’ (Dan Stevens) a former police officer and the most hardened of the criminals.

Abigail, like Ready or Not before leans more towards the comedic than the horrific. The writers and directors display an utter lack of concern with the quantities of cinematic blood that they explode across their frames. There are twists within the simple and contained plot of the film but none that aren’t easily deduced from clues contained with the movie’s trailers. The film can be seen as the love child of The Usual Suspects and an over-the-top Hammer movie.

The cast is uniformly good with particularly standout performances from Kevin Durand as ‘Peter’ the dimwitted muscle of the group and Alisha Weir as the title character Abigail. Weir shows remarkable range for so young a performer going to terrified child to threatening monster in the space of a breath.

Abigail is a not a deep film that comments on the ineffable nature of the human condition but rather is something fun the be experienced and enjoyed. The filmmaking is clever and competent enough that things are established but not so blatantly as to be obvious. This is a film that will be best enjoyed in a theater with a crowd of people laughing and screaming with the rapid onscreen escapades.

Abigail is currently player in theaters.

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Consider the Transporter in Star Trek

CBS Home Video

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Developed as a means of sidestepping the impossible production challenge of landing a ship every time the characters went ashore in Star Trek the transporter is a marvel of impossible science and utterly fantastic energies.

The show’s lore the transport converts the target’s, usually a person, matter into energy, beams it to a distant location, then reconverts that energy back into matter precisely recreating the person at the new location.

Let’s sidestep the ‘Ship of Theseus’ question if the reconstituted person is actually the same person or not for another essay and focus on the physics of this process.

Einstein revolutionized the world with his understanding that energy and matter were equivalents as set forth in the world’s most famous equation E=MC^2. The energy value of a mass is equal to that mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Let’s put a 50-kilogram (110 lbs.) person on the transporter and set them down.

50 kg converted entirely to energy becomes 4,500,000,000,000 megajoules. Such a number is simply beyond human comprehension. It is the equivalent 71 thousand Hiroshima bombs delivered instantaneously as a beam to a distant location. If the transporter chief held a grudge against the person on the planet that had sold him a crummy watch, he could deliver 71 thousand Hiroshimas.

There is a reason why in my Space Opera role playing games when I have introduced a transporter like device it has never ever been of the variety that directly converted matter to energy and back again. Star Trek would have been far better served if someone had decided early on that the transport simply created a gate between places and saved us from both bad technobabble solutions to problems (we’ll just put the doctor in and reconstitute her from an early pattern) and not introduce a weapon of such scale and destruction.

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It Wasn’t a Riot It Wasn’t a Protest; It Was an Assault

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There are those who partisanship exceeds their patriotism and insist that the assault on the Capitol Jan 6, 2021, was really a protest or a riot. They are wrong and nothing they say in the matter of the nation’s governance should be given any weight.

A protest is a collective action to bring attention to a cause or event. Protests can and often do involve illegal actions, blocking freeways and the like. Illegality in protests should be dealt with in the courts, not overly harshly nor overly leniently but the illegal actions do not transform or alter the intent of the protest, to draw attention to a subject.

A riot is an emotional outburst that is shared by multiple individuals and is often contagious. Riots have no direct goals. While an event such as an unjustified death at the hands of authorities can ignite a riot the riot itself burns like an uncontrolled fire. They often spread beyond the inciting cause, causing property damage and too often person injury and death to individuals unassociated with the perceived injustice.

An assault is violence with a goal, a purpose, something to be achieved. An assault can be highly coordinated and planned such as the invasion of fortress Europe on D-Day or as disorganized and spontaneous as impulse mugging for cash. What is central is that there is a goal to be achieved and not a message to be conveyed or uncontrolled emotional burst.

The attack on the U.S. Capital Jan 6, 2021, was an assault with the purpose, the goal, of preventing the certification of the Presidential election and thereby preventing the peaceful transfer of power from the Former President to President-elect Biden. Placing quotations around insurrection is a lie.

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The Soul Crushing Exercise of Querying

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Once you have a completed, edited, and polished manuscript the next step if you are not self-publishing is to find a publisher and or an agent. This is done by sending out letter asking them to review your work and possibly take you on as a client. Those letters are queries and for many people, me included, it is painful frustrating process.

First there is the search for the right sort of agent. You have to find one that represents the sort of writing you do. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to query an agent that specializes in historical romances with your far-flung space opera. You have to find agents that are open to queries. There are so many writers aspiring to a traditional publishing contract that the agents are overwhelmed by the flood of queries. Most only open are specific times and for limited durations.

Once you have gathered a list of potential agents you start sending out those queries, paying particular attention to each agents preference in how that query should be submitted. Do they want a synopsis, something many writers dread crafting. Do you they want sample pages? How many? 5, 10, a chapter or 3 chapters?

Following each agents guidelines you send off the query and wait.

A growing number of agents will let you know in their guidelines that if they are not interested that they simply will not respond. So, you will get absolutely nothing in reply. The vast majority utilize form rejection templates. You know that they are not interested but you can’t be sure of why. Was the writing not good enough? Do they have too many clients with similar stories? Did this story just not ignite a love for it? Did you just catch them on a bad day? You can’t know and you will never know, all you have is the form rejection with your name and the book’s title filled in.

If an agent actually likes the prospect of your book they may ask for the entire manuscript. When you submit that it is more waiting, more uncertainty and still the most likely outcome is another rejection.

With this exhausting and demoralizing process, it is easy to see why so many authors in this day and age prefer to self-publish. it is not a statement about quality but for those of use with talents in graphic design and numerous other skill that make for a good physical book the traditional publication path with tis soul-crushing machinery remains the path we must walk.

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Movie Review: The First Omen

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Saturday night, after getting my taxes completed and filed, and despite the late showtime I finally managed to get out and see The First Omen a prequel to the 1976 horror film The Omen.

20th Century Studios

Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) a young American Nun is transferred to a Catholic orphanage in Rome. There she discovers that the orphanage conceals a dark and terrible secret concerning the coming of the antichrist.

I am a fan of the original film The Omen just as I am a fan of The Exorcist despite being a non-believer myself. And just as with The Exorcist the squeal to The Omen have had little attraction to me most often possessing intercepting ideas that are not quite executed well enough being secondary to shock and jump scares. Sadly, The First Omen, in addition to violating canon, something that was evident in the trailers, fails to commit itself to either the nihilism of the original or shake itself free of aping sequences from its classic progenitor.

In The Omen, while it stands on shaky theological ground, the focus of its theme was clear, a clear acceptance of Christian theology in particular the Book of Revelations and the ending of the world. The writers of The First Omen seem to shy away from such concrete convictions. Instead that place into the mouths of their devote characters prosaic and petty motivations for their conspiracy. This has the double effect of making their goals far less threatening and undercutting the ultimate stakes at play.

The First Omen is competently crafted, and Arkasha Stevenson’s direction is quite well executed. The cast which includes Charles Dance and Bill Nighy are all very good and turn in credible performances. I was distracted by Mark Kroven’s score which neither paid sufficient homage to Jerry Goldsmith’s outstanding original score nor did it stand on its own enough to be compelling in its own right.

While this review may seem harsh it is because I had hoped for better. The First Omen is simply a middling film, not as terrible as some of the sequels that preceded it or as brainless as many horror films but neither did it achieve anything nor seem to have anything interesting to say. Immaculate is the far better evil nuns and church conspiracy film this year.

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