Author Archives: Bob Evans

A More Apt Nazi Germany Analogy for the GOP

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This is coming off the top of my head, but I think there are some useful analogies to be found here.

Fascist Italy: This is the Old Guard Republican Establishment. With the ‘Southern Strategy’ and playing directly to disaffected racist voters they built the new Fascism believing that the dominate position would always be theirs, dreaming of a great Empire that would never materialize. Now they find themselves the powerless junior partner, locked out of their own systems and suffering at the system that they created.

Nazi Germany: This is Trump and his death-cultist, poisoned by the Flavor-Aide and devoted to the one man, the one leader, that is leading them to destruction. Trump seized the machine built by the Establishment and made it serve himself and only himself. Trump and his cult are the driving force of the conflict and they will never stop believing their own deluded lies and myths.

Austria: Remember that Austria was an independent Republic that was ‘annexed’ by Nazi Germany, well these are the Evangelicals. They share a language and a culture with the Trumpists at their side but had until the death-cult ‘annexed’ remained their own force in Conservative American Politics. However, after enthusiastically welcoming the new strong man across their borders they have lost all that independence. Look to that new survey that reports more Republicans trust Trump to tell them the truth than their own pastors. They are now indistinguishable from the Trumpists.

Romania and the minor Axis Powers: These are the wealthy seeking their tax cuts, the businesses looking to escape any and every regulation that impedes even a single penny to their coffers, and the gun-right enthusiasts. They have signed the Axis pact; they have supplied the men and material for the invasions and conquest but now see that they have lashed themselves to a foundering ship. They desperately want to be saved from the consequences of their own actions but are wholly occupied by the death-cult and there is no escape. Their fate, deservedly so, is tied to the cult’s.

Finland: These are the ‘Anti-anti-Trumps’. For these there is no greater enemy than ‘liberals.’ And like Finland they’ll give resources and co-ordinate attacks against the shared ‘enemy’ with the Trumpists all while tutting the co-belligerents war crimes, genocide, and racism. I also suspect that they will also flip the moment their own survival is imperiled turning on those that had just moments before been defending.

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The Werewolf Experiment Continues

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My work in progress, an un-outlined novel about werewolves in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho has reached or nearly has reached the half-way point.

I am aiming for a novel from 80,000 to 90,000 words in length. Yesterday the total word count for the project passed 40,000 as I wrote the unfinished chapter 12.

As I have laid out in earlier posts, my approach to this novel is quite different, starting with a scene that I had no concept of where it might belong in the story and spinning out from there. While there is no formal outline and certainly nothing like the monstrous ones I have produced in the past for other novels, there is a single page document laying out the five acts and very rough plot points that might occur in each of those. But even that is subject to inspirational and sudden change. Last Friday as I reclined in the dentist’s chair while they implanted a socket in my skull for an implanted false tooth a new understanding of the story’s third act, the one I am currently in, came together in an epiphany.

I am unsure of the market for this piece. The genre I am aiming for is horror, modern, real-world set but with fantastic elements horror. Currently there are a lot of werewolf type stories out for people, but an awful lot of the prose ones are romances, with commanding ‘alphas’ as dominate, sexy leads and that is pretty much the opposite of what I am trying to craft.

This work is in theme much closer to the subtext of Siodmak’s The Wolf-Man with a commentary on fascism and how that brutal ideology can be seductive. My werewolves, discarding the discredited ‘alpha wolf’ theory for the junk science that it is, is focuses on wolf family dynamics, transforming these werewolves into ‘Family Value’ fascists. That’s a lot of political weight to carry in a horror novel but I firmly believe that stories have to be about something more than plot and horror needs more than gore.

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Streaming Review: They Cloned Tyrone

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Written by Juel Taylor & Tony Rettenmaier and directed by Juel Taylor They Cloned Tyronecaptures the spirit of 70’s Blaxploitation with a 21st century approach to cinema, storytelling, and metaphor.

Fontaine (John Boyega) is a low-level street drug dealer in the community of the Glenn. Haunted

Netflix

by past tragedy and absent any support systems of people his life is one of ruin, repetition, and violence. While attempting to recover cash owed to him from pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and sex worker Yo-yo (Teyonah Parris) Fontaine is ambushed by rival drug dealer Isaac but the fallout from the attack leads Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-yo to discover a vast racist conspiracy at work on the people of the Glenn.

With a supporting cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and David Alan Grier They Cloned Tyrone is a sharp social satire dealing with the African American community’s twin issues of assimilation or annihilation. In the best tradition of Blaxploitation, the ultimate conflict is between the marginalized community and ‘the man’, ‘the system’ and everything that those terms represent. Stark in its violence, unflinching in the community’s despair, and cutting with both its humor and its satire the film is an excellent outing for its first-time feature film director. Boyega delivers a naturalistic and compelling performance filled with a subtlety that reveals an inner life for Fontaine that he cannot bring himself to speak. Parris is unrecognizable here from her more well-known role as Monica Rambeau from the Marvel Cinematic Universe fully immersing herself into Yo-yo a woman of hidden talents. Foxx of course delivers another talented performance, giving this film’s trio the star power to sell it to both studios and audiences.

If there is a fault in this film, it lies with cinematographer Ken Seng.

Photographic dark-skinned performers can be a challenging task for cinematographers, and this is magnified with scenes that are primarily in darkened room or at night. It is possible that in a properly calibrated auditorium the entire film would present in a dark clarity but They Cloned Tyronewas produced for Netflix, intended for streaming on home screen that vary greatly in their quality and settings. The truth of the matter is that in several scenes I found it impossible to actually see the performances. These are all very talented actors and depriving the audience of the expression is a crime against such a cast.

Aside from the cinematography I found the entire film quite interesting, engaging, and compelling. I would favorably compare this Boyega’s pre–Star Wars film Attack the Block.

They Cloned Tyrone is streaming on Netflix.

 

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Post Tropical Storm Hilary

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Tropical Storm Hilary has swept over San Diego on its way north towards Idaho and here’s the first impression report for my family and friends.

While throughout the country there have been serious effects from so much rain and wind, flooding, downed trees, and electrical outages here and there, overall, it looks as if the county has weathered the storm well and for myself and my sweetie-wife it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

At our condo we suffered no interruption in the power and very little damage around the complex. at least one major branch has come down off one of the trees, landing on a van but aside from that we have not seen serious damage. During the early evening the internet services might have suffered a little lag but then again that could have been Netflix’s servers producing the glitching as we watched They Cloned Tyrone. Later in the night I watched Star Tek: Strange New Worlds and witnessed no issues with the stream.

It is now nearly eight o’clock in the morning on August 21st and I have finished my preparations to go into work. Aside from rain swept streets and road closures that are not on my commute I expect today to proceed in a fairly typical manner.

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Movie Review: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

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In development for more than two decades The Last Voyage of the Demeter, adapted from a chapter of Bram Stoker’s Dracula finally arrived in theaters last weekend.

Universal Studios

Told from the point of view of Doctor Clemens (Corey Hawkins) a late addition to the Demeter’s crew, as the aging ship transports 50 crates from Transylvania to London, unaware that one of the crates harbors the vampire Dracula. In addition to Clemens the crew included Captain Elliot (Liam Cunningham) a captain near retirement, Tobey (Woody Norman) the captain’s eight-year-old grandson and cabin boy, Wojeck (David Dastmalchian) the ship’s mate. Upon discovering a woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) that they believe to have stowed away on the vessel before it sailed, they crew turns fearful and superstitious. Once animals and crew begin dying and vanishing is mysterious manners the fear transforms into terror and the crew find themselves locked in a battle for survival against a creature that defies rationality.

I am notoriously picky and finicky about horror films. It is a genre that I adore but a great many of the fare leave me cold. While much of the horror community raved about ‘X’ I found it a rather standard slasher and uninteresting. The Last Voyage of the Demeter a film and subject I have long wanted to see is neither a great horror film nor is it a terrible one. The is much to admire in the film and the craft of those that created it. André Øvredal’s direction is sharp and sure. He moves his characters confidently both in their blocking and their emotional space, never leaving the audience at sea for what is transpiring in the scene or in the minds of the cast. The script by scribes Bragi Schut jr, and Zak Olkewicz is well structured, wastes little time while still providing enough establishment and backstory to flesh out the characters as people. They also avoid the trope of conveniently having a person aboard familiar with the legends and myth to act as an instructional guide to the others. All of the crew and Anna are clueless in the monsters weakness and true nature. Tom Stern’s cinematography is excellent. With much of the story occurring at night the simulated darkness is as convincing as that performed for Jordan Peele’s Nope, utterly credible and never too murky to see except for when it is by design. When the film revealed the full cast with the ship committed to its doomed voyage, I mentally predicted an ending that if it came to pass, I would have proclaimed as ‘trite’ or ‘unexpected,’ and I can say that ending did not arrive. The filmmakers showed the courage to go places with their script and story that I would have thought invoked a terrible storm of executive’s notes.

And yet with all this going for it, I cannot say I loved this movie.

Some quality, some element was missing that prevented me from fully engaging with the piece. I never lost myself in the story that played upon the screen, remaining detached enough to analyze as I watched. Where other horror films fully pulled me into their nightmare dreams, Get Out, Hereditary, and the like The Last Voyage of the Demeter just missed that mark. This is in all likelihood an idiosyncratic reaction and I have no doubts that many a horror fan will enjoy this film. Even with my own lukewarm response I do not feel my time was wasted and it deserves to be seen on the big screen.

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Deadloch; a Companion Piece to Barbie

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Set in the small Tasmanian town of Deadloch this series is a satirical black comedy that pairs wonderfully with Gerwig’s whip smart Barbie.

Amazon Studios

A murder disrupts Deadloch and a royal visit in the region means that former Detective and now Senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) must partner with the abrasive and outspoken out of town detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami) while managing the drama of small-time life and the turbulence of her marriage to Cath (Alicia Gardiner.) As the number of murders and suspects explodes Dulcie, Eddie, and the residents of Deadloch are forced to confront long buried secrets while navigating a changing culture.

Deadloch‘s satire is sharp, delivered with perfect wit, and never plays favorites. The more ‘enlightened’ townspeople are targeted with equal ferocity as the sexist men and boys of the ‘footy’ club. Never shying away from topics as charges as sexuality, changing demographics, or even colonialism the show’s creatives explore each without a need to become preachy or lose track of either the murder mystery or the near farcical comedy.

Developed and produced in Australia the regional accents and slang may cause some viewers to be momentarily at sea with precisely what a character said or meant but turning on subtitling will alleviate that issue for viewers in need of a little assistance.

Season one totals just eight episodes with the finale just a bit longer that the preceding ones. Shot like a feature film and with a large cast of memorable and quirky characters Deadloch is a good fit for people who not only enjoyed Barbie but Twin Peaks as well.

Deadloch is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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Are You The Same Person in the Morning?

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Amid the myriad hypothetical discussions and debate in science-fiction is the transporter problem.

In Star Trek the transporters work by converting the person to energy, let’s ignore just how freaking much energy would be created by turning tens of kilograms of mass directly to energy, transmitting it to a distant locale and reconverting the energy to mass that precisely recreates the original down to every quantum state of every sub-atomic particle.

There are those that feel a precisely exact duplicate that is indistinguishable from the original is for all practical purposed the original. Conversely there are those that hold the original, destroyed in the conversion process, no longer exists and only a copy now survives. A copy that is perfect in every manner but still a copy.

When it comes to the person transported the debate continues with those that feel even with a continuity of memories and experiences what arrives is a copy. There those that feel that the continuity is the person and any debate about the body being a copy is akin to angels dancing on the head of a pin.

There’s no doubt that a person transported suffers a break in continuity. One moment they are standing on the transporter pad and the next they are on the wind swept plain of an alien planet without any memory or experience connecting the two places. I would imagine it is functionally identical to a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) returning from one of their alters to find themselves somewhere they had no memory of.

In the example of a person with D.I.D. we consider the break in consciousness to be a break in the continuity of the personality and person.

The transporter question can even be applied to everyday events and persons without the need for Sci-Fi environments. Each and every night, or day if you live a flipped schedule, you lose all consciousness when you sleep. That portion of you that is aware, creating continuity of memory and events, ceases for hours and when it returns you have no recollection of the intervening time.

Yes, you might remember dreams, if you awoke during them, otherwise they are inaccessible. People dream several times during a long slumber but only recall the last one because it is the longest in duration and the one that they awoke during.

If you, like me, have occasions of ‘sleep walking’ this break in continuity can be even more pronounced. You went to sleep in your bed but awoke in a different place with the same awareness of the experience in between as that hypothetical person on the transporter pad.

Are you the same person in the morning when you awake as you were when you fell asleep? Dos that break in continuity sever the continuum of your self? If all of your memories are the complex interconnections of your synapses, which remained unchanged during the night, but your consciousness is a property possessed only by a fully active brain, are you a new you every morning?

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Of Parallel And Duplicate Earths

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For its season Finale Star Trek: Strange New Worlds revisited one of classic Trek’s most used budget cutting tropes, a world that looks exactly like out real world. This time instead of a parallel Earth that somehow evolved the exact same continents the justification was a settler colony obsessed with 20th century Earth cultures. (hmm, sound like my book. Same idea deployed for different reasons.) As ‘parallel’ Earths go this was a pretty decent justification and really just there to allow for backlot and location shooting instead of expansive and expensive set construction.

It did get me thinking about those old episodes where the Enterprise discovered a planet exactly like Earth but lightyears distant. It was while watching an old episode of classic Trek that I had one had the idea of writing my own parallel Earth short story.

The possibility of a star system evolving in a doppelganger version of out own is absurdly improbable and the answer to that ‘why is it there?’ question formed the central conceit of the story A Canvas Dark and Deep. Which sold to the fine internet magazine NewMyths.com. You can read it here in their archives.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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From Soulless Monstrosity to Nerd Rapture

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ reinterpretation of legacy characters from the original series has certainly intrigued me. I find I am most fascinated by the new version of Nurse Christine Chapel. Jess Bush’s portray of this Christine, along with a more detailed and varied backstory and motivation has placed her as one of my favorites in this new series. No slight to Mrs. Barrett-Roddenberry, she was given precious little to work with in the original series. Beyond pining for Spock her role possessed no character.

Except of course for episode eight, or seven depending on how you count them, season one What Are Little Girls Made Of?

CBS StudiosFirst aired in October of 1966 the episode centers of the Enterprise searching for the lost humanitarian scientist Dr. Roger Korby, coincidentally the fiancé to Christine Chapel. It is revealed that Korby has discovered the ruins of an ancient and now vanished civilization and from their remaining technology can produce android nearly indistinguishable from humans. He has a nefarious plot and by the end of the episode is defeated and revealed to be an android himself. Fatally injured he had used the technology to transfer himself into a mechanical body a process with which he expected to create practically immortal humans. Kirk and Christine are horrified by the revelation that Korby had been a machine the entire time. When Spock arrives with a rescuing security team Kirk informs him that ‘Dr. Korby was never here.’

It is an interesting question when did our attitude toward ‘uploading’ ourselves into machines change?

What Little Girls are Made Of spends no time debating if Korby is in fact still Roger Korby. Once it is shown that he is a machine his pleas that he has remained himself fall on the deaf ears of Kirk and Chapel. The premise of the episode is that his actions, plotting to replace people until his android society is too advanced to resist, are accepted as proof that he was never Korby ignoring the simple fact that people change. Or that five years of isolation can unhinge even the strongest of minds. Only the fact that he is a mechanical machine instead of a biological one is enough to ‘prove’ he was never Korby. A machine person will always, at that time, be regarded as a soulless monstrosity.

Today the concept of ‘uploading’ yourself into a tireless and immortal machine housing is pretty much a technological rapture, a promise of eternal, blissful life for the those with faith in the Disney Studioslimitless capability of the computational sciences. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier neither Rogers nor Romanov, or the audience for that matter, question if it really is Dr. Zola addressing them from the vast computer banks at the end of the film’s second act. It is simply accepted that with advanced enough super-science of course a person, the entirety of them transferred into another receptacle. Zola’s monstrosity was a product of who Zola was and not from the mechanical nature of his afterlife.

I wonder when did that state change occur in out collective thinking? When did we accept that it is our memories and sense of continuity that defines the ‘real’ us?

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B Movie Review: The 27th Day

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The 27th Day adapted from the name of the same name by John Mantley is a mostly forgotten Sci-Fi B Feature that presents an alien threat is a quite unique manner.

Five people are abducted from the Earth and given each a container with three capsules that when armed and fired have the capability to annihilate every person on the planet while leaving all other life untouched. The unnamed alien presenting these devices explains that his own Columbia Picturesworld is doomed and will soon be destroyed by a natural event. His culture’s ethical standards will not permit them to kill humanity and take the Earth as a replacement, but should humanity kill itself, then the Earth would be free for his people to use to save themselves. The five abductees, a newspaper reporting, an English woman, a Soviet solider, a Chinese Peasant woman, and a brilliant German Scientist, are under no compulsions or influence. Once returned to the Earth they may do as they will, free and unencumbered. The containers given to each of them can only be opened by its assigned person but once opened the weapons are usable by anyone. After 27 days the weapons will become inert. The abductees are then returned to the location from which they were taken. Shortly thereafter the alien hijacks all global electromagnetic communications to announce that the five have been given each a powerful weapon, naming each of the abductees and their city of residence, sending the planet into chaos, panic, and paranoia.

I stumbled upon this movie by accident and after watching it was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the novel and give that a read.

For the most part the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, except for the ending. To discuss this and way I think in the end the movie was a disservice to the novel I will go into spoilers for the ending and the alien’s motivation.

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The German scientist, convinced that there is something more than just death in the capsules, persuades the newspaper man to give him his package and deciphering the mathematical notation etched on their surfaces works out the capsules true potential and, without anyone’s approval or pre-knowledge, fires them, blanketing the globe.

In the movie everyone who was an ‘enemy of freedom’ is killed but all other people are left untouched.

In the novel, no one is killed, but rather each person altruism is heightened. Selfishness vanishes from the human race and people who hoarded resources, be they gangster or corporate overlord, surrender their excess for the betterment of all.

In both version the Earth then invites the alien race to come a share the planet with humanity.

In the film’s version this is nice but ultimately doomed. The concept ‘an enemy to freedom’ is far too slippery to come even close to establishing the sort of human nature that would not fear alien and treat them with the hatred we launch at each other over things as inconsequential as skin tones.

The novel’s notion that a more empathic and altruistic humanity is a more open and accepting one is far more interesting and poses far more challenging ethical questions. With the film’s conclusion there’s only a debate over what does it mean to be ‘an enemy of freedom’ but with the novel’s there’s the argument is it right to fundamentally change a person or a species without their consent even if the results is a universal good?

In 2008 a remake of the classic SF film The Day the Earth Stood Still was released and attempted to change the message of the film from one fearing nuclear annihilation to one of environmental disaster and the result was a disastrous movie. Hollywood would have been better served remaking The 27th Day with its themes of greed and hoarding over attempting to hijack a classic.

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