Category Archives: SF

Thinking About Another SF Noir Novel

 

 

As I close in on finishing my current work in progress, a murder mystery set on a ship that has been traveling between the start for over 230 years, I am beginning to consider what to write next.

Last year my debut novel Vulcan’s Forge was published by Flametree press and while being released the week the world shutdown at the start of this damnable pandemic did nothing good for its sales number its blending of off-world science-fiction with classic film noir styling proved to be fun to write and fairly well reviewed. I have the basics of a plot already in mind for my next novel in fact it has been sitting and cooking on the back burner for about six months and recently I had the epiphany that it may work best as a noirish story. It would however make in one way a major break with noir’s genre conventions.

Noir, in my opinion, is strongest and most compelling with the driving force of the plot is some base human emotion, greed or lust being the most common ones used. Noir has a cynical worldview and tends to view people in the worst possible light. Friends and lovers will betray you and you cannot count on even yourself much less anyone else.

But is it possible to craft a noir where the driving motivation is one that is generally considered admirable? That is the idea that has taken root in my brain. A character obsessed with something most people would agree is a good and valuable goal but in order to achieve it step by step walks themselves down a dark, twisted path where events spin beyond their control.

I think this can work. I think it could be an interesting study of how even a good person with good goals can so easily lose their way when they accept the adage that the ends justify the means.

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A Harebrained Film: Night of the Lepus

 

A dozen years after the release of her cinematically legendary showers sequence and eight years before she would appear with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s

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atmospheric horror film The Fog, Janet Leigh, along with DeForest Kelley three years after Star Trek grounded, starred in a most unusual SF horror movie 1972’s Night of the Lepus.

Adapted from the satirical SF novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon, NOTL’s central conceit is the Arizona countryside suffering nocturnal assaults from mutated giant rabbits.

The film attempts and fails to build credibility for its premise by opening with a faux newscaster intoning seriously about rabbits upsetting the delicate ecological balance in Australia after their introduction to that continent. From there the story moves to Arizona where rancher Hillman is dealing with a rabbit infestation of his own. Rather than deploy harsh poisons to deal with the pests his friend Clark (DeForest Kelley) at the university puts him in contact with a husband/wife team of scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Gerry Bennett played by Janet Leigh.) The pair decide that using hormones to make ‘boy rabbits act more like girl rabbits’ is the solution to Hillman’s troubles and begin experimentation on rabbits captured from the ranch. The filmmakers use the Bennett’s young daughter both as clumsy exposition, ‘Mommy what is a control group?’ and the method by which a rabbit already mutated by the artificial is released into the wild to infect the ranch’s rouge population. And yes, the film tries to force the idea that hormonally changing one rabbit somehow infects other without the use of a bacteria or virus. Despite the EPA having been established two years earlier the scientific pair also have no hesitation in developing and deploying an unknown effect into the ecology without significant testing as their timeline from concept to eradication was mere weeks.

The greatest hurdle the filmmakers failed to clear isn’t the lack of character arcs or scientific illiteracy but rather no amount of slow-motion photography on miniature sets and even with fake blood smeared on their snouts, rabbits cannot look credibly frightening. Rabbits as a violent lethal threat belongs solely to the domain of British farce and not in the dying giant animal genre.

I found Night of the Lepus streaming for free on a Roku channel, but they interrupted the movie every ten minutes for a block of five commercials. even minus those interruptions except for comedic entertainment I could not recommend this strange unique movie.

 

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Television Thoughts: Resident Alien

 

Confession: We do not have cable television in our home and have not had it for close to eight years. Everything my sweetie-wife and I watch is either streamed or on disc so when a new show premiers on a cable channel we either have to wait for its arrival on a streaming service or if it’s something we have high expectation of enjoying buying an entire season to stream. Which is what we did for SyFy Channel’s original series Resident Alien.

Resident Alien adapted from a comic book series by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse stars Alan Tudyk as an alien who has come to Earth on a deadly mission but due to a mishap and crash has assumed the identity of Doctor Harry Vanderspeigle in the small, isolated community Patience Colorado and finds himself embroiled in murder investigations, family dramas, romantic entanglements, and the mission of a young boy to expose the truth of alien presence. The show is a mixture of comedy and drama with the balance clearly tilted towards the comedic as Patience is populated with an assortment of quirky, broadly sketched, farcical characters that live with one foot in realistic human emotions and the other firmly planted in broad comedy.

Tudyk is one of our best working comedic actors with a career that stretched from A Knights Tales, thru firefly/Serenity up to and past Rouge One: A Star Wars Story. He brings a real charm and sense of timing that carries the comedy off quite well and his choices in his performance particularly when we can compare it against his performance as the human version of the character are unique.

Mixing drama and comedy doesn’t work for everyone but in my opinion, it’s flying high here in Resident Alien.

Resident Alien airs on Syfy on Wednesday nights and is available to purchase from a number of platforms.

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I Write Lean

 

As I approach the end of the first draft of my new novel I am once again struck with thoughts on my own writing process.

Many sf/fantasy novels today are well north of 100,000 words and yet my own works tend to land around that mark or under. Vulcan’s Forge (available from all booksellers) was a slim 80,000 and generally well-reviewed and the feedback I got was that the exposition was deft and sufficient so it would not appear that I am shortchanging on conveying my world-building to readers.

It is simply that I write lean. This is not to say I write better or worse than authors who have much larger works. It is a function of both plot and style not of quality. I find that in my editing and even in my critiquing I tend to be an advocate of cutting out words, phrases, or sentences for more direct writing.

I think this stylistic approach is in part a development that sprung from my lifelong love of film. Cinema is by its nature a very lean form of storytelling. While producing longer books os more expensive that cost increase is nothing compared to the fantastic cost of making a feature length film. This constraint presses on production to tell their stories in the simplest, leanest, method possible that can still achieve the artistic vision of the film. It is perhaps the single most identifiable element of my voice. (Someone else would have to speak to that matter I seem constitutionally incapable of seeing hearing my own voice in my fiction.)

I am quite comfortable with my lean prose and writing and hopefully others will be as well.

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5 Quick Thoughts

 

1) My current Work in Progress novel is rapidly reaching the completion for the first draft. I am currently at 97 thousand words and the story is likely to land between 101 and 106 thousand, then onto the revisions.

2) Resident Alien the SciFi show on Syfy has been pretty entertaining. Quirky characters, fun premise, and a fantastic performance from Alan Tudyk as the extraterrestrial marooned on Earth and masquerading as a doctor is amazing.

3) A deep concern for all my friends and everyone in the massive state of Texas.

4) I get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday and I urge everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they are able.

5) Ted Cruz once again displays that not only does have zero concern for the well-being of anyone not in a position to help him but that his intellectual capabilities are hamstrung by his selfish desires and wants. A competent villain would have used the crisis the forge a facade of ability and caring to propel them to greater political power but Cruz is incompetent as he is cruel and spineless.

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Re-Reading Dune

 

A few weeks ago, I purchased a new copy of Dune on eBook and began a re-read of the science-fiction classic. It had been decades since I last read Dune and while the major contours of the plot were well-known to me one of the things that took me by surprise is the out of style point of view.

Writing prose comes in three major points of view.

1) First Person, where the narrative is told directly by the character. The story is literally narrated by the protagonist. It’s a very intimate with every word being the character’s own. It’s also very limited as you can only see and hear what the character sees and hears.

2) Second Person, this takes the form of ‘You see this’ and so on. It is very rare as a fictional point of view but has been used here and there though it never works for me and always kicks me out of the story.

3) Third Person where the prose drops the artifice of a narrator and the prose is told from the viewpoint of observation outside of the characters,

Third person subdivides into three more types.

Third Person Objective, this is best thought of as a ‘like a movie.’ The point of view is outside all of the characters’ inner thoughts or lives and while we can see and hear things around the character we can never see into the characters’ heads.

Third Person Close, here we have a point of view that takes its tone from the character and even present narrative bits with the same biases and observations as the character. Looking at a factory with a close third person view where the character is an environmentalist may present the scene as despoiled and ugly while the same factory with an industrialist character may be presented as vibrant and thriving. This is the point of view most in style today.

Third Person Omniscient, this is the ‘god’s view.’ The point of view can be whatever the author wants. Close to the characters or even inside their minds hearing their thoughts and it is applied to whatever character the author needs. This is the point of view of Dune and it used to be used a lot more often than it is used today. A danger of the third person objective is something called ‘head hopping’ where the point of view switches often and frequently between various characters and this is very true in Dune. Two characters in the novel will be having a conversation and the Herbert will fly between the unspoken thoughts of both back and forth. To me this is jarring and makes the scenes difficult to emotionally engaged with as I have to keep shifting mental gears to follow the oscillating points of view. Mind you this point of view is a fairly common one decades ago and its disuse is more of a matter of style than narrative rule. However, because it is a now nearly an archaic prose approach it has put some distance between me and the book.

 

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Late to the Game: Star Trek Discovery

 

Though the series is in its third season it was only just this week that I started watching Star Trek: Discovery.

My affiliation with Star Trek goes all the way back to the series’ original run in the mid to late 1960s, though as a child my understanding of the episodes at that time was quite spotty. By the mid 70s with syndication I became quite familiar with the series and a lifelong fan. To this day the words Star Trek always conjure the 60s television show before all other images.

I enjoyed The Next Generation seasons 3 thru 5 finding the first two a little dry and the having lost interest later as the stories became to fantastical and too often resolved by hand waving rather than character motivations. Deep Space Nine was amusing but not compelling to me. I switched off Voyager by the third episode and bounced of Enterprise’s pilot, so the announcement of a new series did not exactly excite me. With the added hurdle it required subscribing to yet another pay streaming service I simply never watched Star Trek: Discovery.

A subscription deal by way of one of my credit card companies along with the promise of a much larger library of Paramount films induced me to finally try the service and now I have watched the first three episode of Discovery.

I’m enjoying it.

The stories so far are much more character based with flawed and imperfect people propelling the plot by their motivations, mistakes, and misapprehensions rather than relying on ‘It’s science-fiction so we can do anything!’ plotting.

Don’t get me wrong, the science of the show is still far from rigorous, but the same can be said of the original series. I like it when an SF property works hard to get their science right but one can be entertained by compelling characters without the edge of hard SF.

I recognize that the series is at odds with what many consider cannon for the Federation Universe but again the original show, produced during the heyday of episodic television where every episode stood alone, never bent knee to the gods of continuity. So much so that modern younger fans watching the original episodes conclude that General Order 24 in A Taste of Armageddon  must be a bluff rather than that the beloved United Federation of Planets actually has a general order for the destruction of a civilization. Old Trek and new trek have never been fully compatible.

So, recognizing those points, I like the show and it’s take on the characters. I enjoy the concept of a central human character who was raised on Vulcan and whose identity is conflicted by being biological human of culturally Vulcan. It’s possible that the first three episodes have misled me and if that is the case there are other programs to occupy my time but for now I am a fan and it has become part of my unwind ritual before bedtime.

Star Trek: Discovery currently streams on CBS All Access soon to be rebranded as Paramount +.

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Post-Apocalyptic Progenitor: Deluge

Post-Apocalyptic Progenitor: Deluge

Recently on an episode of the podcast Junk Food Cinema one of the hosts, C. Robert Cargill, made a brief foray into the history of post-apocalyptic movies as part of their discussion centered on the satirical movie A Boy and his Dog. In that history when he talked about the original post-apocalyptic film, I expected him to detail 1936’s The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells which covers a war that shatter civilization, the barbarity that followed, and the eventual enlightened society that developed. (It is really a fascinating movie with a look at the horrors another world war might bring created during the interwar period.) Instead of that film Cargill talked about an earlier movie 1933’s Deluge.After a little bit of searching, I found a Roku channel that streamed the movie and watched it last night.

Clocking in at a lean 70 minutes Deluge wastes no time in telling its story. Centered on three principal characters Martin and Helen Webster along with their two small children and Claire an athletic swimming champion socialite. However, none of the three are present much in the film’s establishing act. Scientists are concerned by strange weather patterns portending massive storms. A series of earthquakes moving eastward that submerge the entirety of the US’s West Coast along with reports of similar seismic events from Europe indicate a global catastrophe that crashes all of civilization. Martin and Helen attempt to endure the terrible storms but are separated leaving Martin as the apparently sole survivor of the family on an isolated spit of land. Claire finds herself at the hands of a pair of men as equally uncivilized at the landscape. She escapes and discovers Martin where they form a bond in the struggle to survive. Helen, not killed during the cataclysm, has ended up with a settlement of survivors and all three set of characters are forced to deal with a violent marauding band in the area. Deluge’s final act centers not on combating the marauders but resolving the romantic triangle of Martin/Helen/Claire.

Deluge was a far more entertaining film that I had expected. There’s no doubt that many of the tropes we still see in post-apocalyptic fictions are present in the pre-code piece of cinema which depicts the harsh times following the disaster with an unexpected brutality. I appreciate that the filmmakers made no attempt to actually explain the causes of the worldwide disaster. Sometimes in speculative fiction it is better to just have the fantastic happen and not explain than to try and craft a justification that doesn’t work. It is an interesting sociological note that the film opens with a title card reminding the audience that this is a work of fantasy because in the bible God had promised to never flood the world again.

I do not regret at all spending just over an hour watching Deluge and for people fascinated by disaster films it is well worth a watch to see the progenitor of so many cinematic cliches.

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Godzilla 2014

 

With the year’s release of the newest ‘Monsterverse’ featureGodzilla vs King Kong a massively budgeted remake of the decidedly campy 1962 film of the same name I have decided to revisit the earlier films in the series starting with 2014 American Godzilla.

The original Toho production from 1954 Godzilla is a defining piece of cinema the created the Kaiju film genre where people in suits and with miniature models created scenes of destruction and titian battles between impossibly large creatures. However, the first film Gojira in japan was a serious commentary on nuclear weapons and the terrible price of war and following in tone but not theme Godzilla 2014 was produced with an eye towards dramatic storytelling over campy kids’ entertainment.

While the trailers heavy feature Bryan Cranston, and every movie can use more Bryan Cranston, Godzilla 2014 starts Aaron-Taylor Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen whose lives, along with millions of others, are disrupted when a secret the government of the world explodes into view, that the world was once populated by Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organisms or MUTOs and that the Pacific Atomic Tests of the 50’s had been an attempt to kill one of these monstrous beasts, Godzilla. Now, following at ‘accident’ a Japanese nuclear powerplant 15 years earlier a pair of MUTOs are leaving a wake of destruction as they hunt for radioactive material to feed upon and mate, nest, and threaten humanity with a world repopulated with MUTOs.

Directed by Gareth Edwards with a screenplay by Max Borenstein Godzilla 2014 had little pretension to a deep philosophical theme or any meaningful emotional arc for its central characters but rather focuses, rightly so in my opinion, of the special effect spectacle of mighty Kaiju monsters combating humanity and each other through Japan, Hawaii, and San Francisco. It is movie built for fun. Where it is better to switch off any real-world science, nuclear and biological, and release your inner child that revels in excitement of action on inhuman scales. Taylor-Johnson and Olsen have little to do as emotional characters but we don’t watch a film like this for Kaiju version of Ordinary People.

If you enjoy massive monsters, grand destruction, and fantastic concept then Godzilla 2014 may be for you.

 

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My Favorite Season: Agents of Shield

 

I’m old enough to remember when having a favorite season of a television program would have been quite strange. Before the advent of long form story telling season may have been good or bad but that rarely became favorites.

I watched all seven seasons of ABC’s Agents of SHIELD(henceforth known as AoS) during its original broadcast run and now as an unwinding before bed I am re-watching them in order from Netflix. There is no doubt in my mind, Season 4 is my favorite of the seven.

Split between two storylines, the front half centered on the Ghost Rider with the second half focused on rogue Life Model Decoys (LMDs) and the virtual world of the ‘framework’ the two halves are united by the ancient, magical, and corrupting book The Darkhold.

The Ghost Rider is fun, told well, and takes a different spin on the character than the original source but without violating the spirit of the Ghost Rider. The twist revealing the eventual ‘big bad’ was a well-played but for me the season really exploded with the ‘Framework’, the twists and turns of the artificial Intelligence ADIA and the sheer fun of watching actors and characters we had known for three and half season suddenly get to play vastly different colors and personalities.

While Mallory Jansen has been brought in during season four to play ADIA she was hands down the MVP for playing a wide range of characters during the season. She played ADIA, the LMB and rogue artificial intelligence with an evil and yet tragic motivation, Agnes the artistic human that ADIA was modeled upon, Madame Hydra, the supreme leader of Hydra in the virtual world of the Framework, and various shadings of all of these characters from the flat affectation of ADIA when she was little more than a robot to Agnes a frightened woman facing her own mortality.

Continuing storylines can make it difficult to jump into a series these days if you haven’t watched from the start but I do think season four of AoS can be enjoyed without having the watch the previous three, though of course it works much better if you have.

 

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