Category Archives: SF

76,000 Words

 

My work in progress, currently titled as Murder on the Bellerophon, has reached 76,000 words and I am expecting that the finished first draft will land between 95,000 and 100,000 words. My published novel, Vulcan’s Forge available wherever you buy books, was a slim 80,000 words but at this moment I do not feel that the current WIP is in need of any serious cutting.

I am also happy to report that I have written my way through what I expected to be the most difficult sequence in the novel. When I outlined the book, my intent was to tell the tale from a single viewpoint. I think with mysteries it is best to restrict your viewpoints as much as possible. However, in the planning I developed a sequence where a character is chased by an angry mob and it was simply impossible to have my protagonist present. A part of me dreaded this essential plot development while not having my point of view right there. It is the sort of scene that can easily be boring if told via another character’s flashback or worse yet watched by the protagonist on a monitor. Surprisingly when I actually reached that section, it rolled on with the same ease that the previous chapters had.

I have a few more scenes that will be written this week and with those Act 4 will close and I will swing into the novel’s final act. Then will come revisions and editing and then the beta readers. There is always more work to be done.

 

Share

First Thoughts on WandaVision

 

I’m a little late to the game but here are my first impressions of the Disney + new MCU series WandaVision.

‘It’s okay.’

Admittedly this is a nine-episode storyline and trying to judge it from the first one or two is unfair but that’s all we have so far. I have been an MCU fan from the first Iron Man feature film though I was never a collector of comics themselves so things like ‘Is this an adaptation of The House of M storyline go right over my head. However, as a fan I have thoroughly enjoyed the MCU and think overall it has been a spectacular success.

The first episode of WandaVision didn’t really strike me as a solid entry. They did a very good job recreating a classic late-50s sitcom but it suffered from the ‘it’s all a dream’ trope. We know what is happening isn’t reality, and to be fair the show never expects you to accept it as reality but rather part of the mystery, so the ‘impress the boss or lose your job’ stakes are meaningless filler. The first episode doesn’t give us enough stakes or even hints of stakes outside of the illusionary sitcom to create meaningful tension.

The second episode with more unmistakable intrusions by other realities and with an ending that questions who is pulling the strings does a much better job of creating the tension that the first episode lacked and is probably the reason the pair were dropped together with the rest of the series being released one the week-by-week format favored by the streaming service. Though it was nice seeing one of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer favorites, Emma Caufield now credited as Emma Caufield Ford, back on my screen even if the role is likely to remain quite small.

I will stick with WandaVision as I intrigued by the plot but at this time I have not been wooed by the series.

 

Share

Some of My Work

Some of My Work

What role do movies play in shaping culture? If you were building a culture from nothing how could movies help you shape the people and their attitudes?

These are two of the questions explored in my SF noir novel Vulcan’s Forge. Set on the distant human colony of Nocturnia which is isolated and without any external contact, Jason Kessler chaffs at the colonies pseudo-Americana society that he helps shape with carefully curated mass media while fascinated by the tawdry, forbidden films banned from public or private viewing. When Pamela Guest sweeps into his life offering unrestricted access to these pleasures and more Jason is drawn into a web of lies, crimes, and conspiracies that shatters everything he thought he knew about his home.

Vulcan’s Forge was released the first week of the global lockdown last year but copies are available everywhere and signed ones from my local bookseller Mysterious Galaxy.

Remember when in the original Series of Star Trek because the budgets and the technology were so limited to produce the show how often the characters encountered ‘duplicates’ of Earth? I certainly do and that inspired for the question, how could a duplicate Earth exist? What might that mean? The result of that speculation was my short story A Canvass Dark and Deep which was published by NewMyths.com and is reprinted in their anthology Twilight Worlds: The Best of Newmyths, available in both ebook and print.

Share

Streaming Review: Prospect (2018)

 

Prospect is a 2018 feature length adaptation of the a 2014 short film of the same title and concerns an adolescent Cee, her father Damon, prospecting for valuable biological gems on a toxic planet and the bandit they encounter, Ezra, played by Pedro pascal.

Having learned that this is a feature-length version of a much shorter work goes a very long way in explaining the film’s defects.

Deus ex Machina, which literally means the gods from the machines, is the writing sin of having spontaneous external events resolve the characters troubles, usually saving their lives, that arise from no action, pre-planning, or establishment. The gods intervene and force the happy ending. Prospect is actually an example of the opposite of that, perhaps you might call it Demons ex Machina. Throughout the run time of the film Cee encounters new and wildly unexpected troubles that have no rational set-up beforehand but exist solely to create conflict where there wouldn’t be otherwise. Just as resolutions must arise naturally from the characters, their natures, and their talents, so much the obstacles that hinder their progress and test them. In Role Playing Games there is the concept of ‘the wandering monster’ an encounter with a hostile force that is unconnected the characters’ central storyline. An attack by trolls in the middle of the night while camping. These encounters add excitement and deplete the players’ resources for later pre-plotted fights and make a good element to well-balanced games but they make a poor substituted for a well-crafted narrative and that is exactly what Prospect feels like, a series of random encounters and then a final boss fight, decent gaming but poor story telling.

Setting aside the random nature of the troubles Cee encounters the movie is decent. The actors are all good, the production values look great, with a very limited budget the filmmakers managed to craft a movie that doesn’t look limited. The dialog at times is very reminiscent of Firefly with a pseudo-western cadence but delightfully not all the characters speak in that manner creating a sense of people from very different backgrounds.

While flawed I did not regret the time spent watching Prospectand for others, I have no doubts it will work far better.

Prospect is currently streaming on Netflix.

Share

Thinking About Stakes

When crating fiction a common bit of advice to ‘raise the stakes.’ This is a suggestion of magnify the penalty for failure for the protagonist making the eventual success or failure that much more impactful for the reader or audience. However, this is usually or at least often interpreted as threaten more lives, make the potential explosions larger, the potential death toll higher but that is too simplistic a way to think about stakes.

In franchise material there is what I call the ‘Bond Effect’ where each adventure has to have more on the line than the previous adventure. Very quickly the writers find themselves in the situation where Bond has to save the entire world, from nuclear annihilation, a murderous madman with a secret orbiting space station of death, what have you, and once he has saved the world saving it again has less entertainment value We know there is never going to be a Bond film where the world dies, not even the 70s got that bleak so the combination of an assured outcome and devalued victory makes each world save less thrilling until they become boring. For this effect magnified beyond look to the UK program Doctor Who where the stakes have been repeatedly raised to the entire universe sometimes destroying and recreating the universe as their climatic conclusions.

What all this misses is that stakes are most potent when we are emotionally invested in them. Setting aside the ‘save the world or universe’ trope the protagonist is they fail should suffer deep emotional coast and or loss. This is a lesson well learned in dramatic fiction and too often not in genre stories. Marvel studios did this particularly well in a couple of films, notably Captain America: The Winter Soldier where after saving the world we got to the real stakes for Steve Rogers, saving his friend Bucky Barnes from Hydra’s mind control and Captain America: Civil War where the world was never in danger but rather at its heart it is the friendship between Steve and Tony Stark that is in danger and in that story ultimately lost. The cost of failure is the emotional damage to the characters, these are very high stakes that are intimately personal and emotionally compelling for the audience.

It’s easy to craft plots with larger and larger death star threatening planets and entire star systems it is harder but more satisfying into dive deep into character and find the thing that matters most to them as a person and make us the readers and the audience share in the terror of losing that thing. Then you will have stakes that really matter.

Share

Without Grogu is There a Story?

Light Spoilers for the Entire Run of The Mandalorian to date.

The Mandalorian is Disney +’s original Star Wars series set during the period after the fall of the Galactic Empire and before the events of The Force Awakens. Its central and titular character is Din Djarin an orphan raised in a Mandalorian creed that emphasizes warrior qualities and religious devotion to never revealing one’s face to another living being. Mandalorian in the lore of Star Wars are a people and a belief that are currently suffering a diaspora after the conquest of their home-world with many serving as mercenaries and bounty hunters. Din lives as a bounty hunter in a near sociopathic existence without compassion or remorse until a contract has him ‘obtaining’ an asset the child ‘Grogu’ or better known popularly as ‘Baby Yoda.’ Din forms a bond with the 50-year-old child and ends up forsaking his bounty hunter life with a quest to reunite the child with the Jedi that are responsible for Grogu.

Over the course of two season Din and Grogu encounter many characters, some original to the show some from other Star Wars properties until in the final episode of season two Grogu departs with a jedi master with Din revealing his face to the child before their farewell.

The Mandalorian has been a major success for Disney penetrating deep into the cultural conversation, drawing subscribers to their streaming service, and igniting fresh enthusiasm for a franchise more than 40 years old but I wonder what happens next?

I have enjoyed the series, but I also see that the episodes are often very light ion story while heavy on plot. An entire episode will be devoted to a single plot point, infiltrating an Imperial base to gain access to a piece of datum that moves the plot forward but in terms of character has very little to say. The only powerful story element of the series has been the transformation of Din because of his bond with Grogu and with Grogu departure what is there that is emotionally compelling about Din’s adventures? The series had first-rate action, ground-breaking visual effects, and a radical approach to placing actors and characters into fantastic settings that is going to change the industry forever but none of that is gripping emotional storytelling. Grogu is the reason the series has exploded culturally; Din is a cypher, and it is very difficult to make a cypher a compelling character. Not impossible mind you, mysterious samurai and gun slingers without names have carried film franchises for a few films but that’s a shorter run than a television series.

Only time and another season will show if the writers of the Mandaloriancan expand their show beyond spectacle, action, and ‘easter eggs’ of fan lore.

Share

The Marvel Show That Sailed Away

The Marvel Cinematic Universe had run a fairly tight ship continuity-wise. There have been a few misstep and clues dropped that led to nowhere, such as The Ten Rings reference in Iron Man that never paid off but overall the studio has done a good job presenting its properties as taking place in the same share setting.

And then there’s Marvels’ Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. which ran on ABC from 2013 thru 2020 for 136 episodes and followed the turbulent lives of a few SHIELD agents as they navigated personal, professional, and powered challenges in a world suddenly infused with enhanced beings and aliens.

For the first season the program hewed close to the events of the MCU, the agents were dispatched to the UK as part of the clean-up and follow-up crew in the wake of the destruction unleased by the conflicts of Thor: The Dark Worldand the agency was toppled by the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But as the series progressed the connections between the feature films and the events the television characters encounter weakened until finally the most massive event of the MCU, Thanos’ eradication of half of all life in the universe, is never referenced and for all practical purposes never happens.

Agents of SHIELD did play with a number of concepts and characters from Marvel mythology with the introduction of Life Model Decoy, android replicas of characters, the best onscreen portrayal of the Ghost Rider character, and the introduction of the Inhumans as a stand in for mutant powered individuals as that ‘term’ for enhanced superpowered character was tied up with the right to the X-Men franchise with Fox studios.

All seven season of Agents of Shield are available for streaming on Netflixand I am currently doing a front to back re-watch of the series.

Share

Revisiting: Planet of the Vampires

Italian Director and Cinematographer Mario Bava, best known for giallofilms such as Blood and Black Lace and horror movies like Black Sunday, in 1965 released the stylish is somewhat misnamed science-fiction horror film Planet of the Vampires.

A pair of spaceships, the Argos and the Galliott arrive at the planet Aura investigating signals that may signify intelligent life. When the ships, after being unable to observe the plant’s surface due to a constant impenetrable could layer, attempt to land they are subjected to a mysterious increased in gravity that renders all of the crew except for the Argos’ commander Mark (Barry Sullivan) unconscious. As quickly as it arrived the mysterious forces dissipates the Argos lands perfectly but when the crew awake, they are overtaken by violent impulses and nearly kill each other. With their wits gathered the Commander must locate and rescue the Galliott and discover the terrifying secret of planet Aura before everyone is killed by the planet’s mysterious force.

I first saw Planet of the Vampires, and there are no traditional vampires anywhere in the story, when I was a young teenager. A late night ‘creature feature’ broadcast the film, particularly its ending, stayed with me from the 70s through the 2000s when I obtained first a DVD and then later a Blu-ray release. While the characters are threadbare serving plot rather than dramatic functions the film is immensely stylish and unforgettable in its beautiful cinematography. All the more impressive when it’s known that the entire budget was less than that of two episodes the original Star Trek series. There are very few optical effects in the film with most of the ‘special effects’ captured in-camera and yet quite credible and lovely. Set design, though impractical for an actual starship, is modern, for the mid-60s, and immersive.

It’s difficult to accurately judge the acting of the movie. Planet of the Vampires was produced in the International Style used by many Italian productions of the period where the multinational cast all delivered their lines in their native languages, often without know what the other characters were actually saying, and then the rest of the cast would be dubbed into various language for other markets.

Based on an Italian SF short story One night of 21 hours the movie’s ending, which I will not spoil here, is one of the scenes that managed to stay stuck in my memory over the decades. Even during the years when the film’s title had faded from recall the ending remained.

This film is not to everyone’s taste, you must be able to accept style over plausibility, but if you do you will be rewarded.

Planet of the Vampires is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Share

I Almost Feel Like a Pantser

Today is a day to turn my attention away, at least for a few hours, from the electoral crisis gripping our nation so I’m going to talk about my writing.

I am an outliner. I can’t tackle a long form piece of fiction without an outline. For me the critical junctions in a story must be known before I can start putting the words in a row. But my outlines are not all the same.

If I am remembering correctly my longest outline for a novel was a massive 87 pages and for my current WIP it is 21 pages.

However, as I am writing this novel it feels like there is so much more being discovered in the process that wasn’t even hinted at in the outline.

Oh, the act breaks are falling on the same major event and the plot aspects are proceeding perfectly on pace, but I am inventing and uncovering aspects I had not thought about that only arise as I try to fit myself into the character’s skin. Major emotional beats are coming from out of nowhere and with the foreknowledge of where I need to end up, I can incorporate them properly.

When I started I had a lot of trepidation about this project, it’s a genre I haven’t really written in before, its main character is a challenge, and knowing that it is very likely that someone already is holding expectations about it all pile on new levels of anxiety and yet it seems to be flowing rather nicely.

Here’s hoping that continues.

Share

The Problem with Frankenstein Films

Being a universally beloved and known property that exits in the Public Domain there is rarely a shortage of adaptations, reinterpretations, and extension of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

The last really big elaborate adaptation came from producer Francis Ford Coppola and director/star Kenneth Branagh with 1994’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I remember seeing this one in the theater and being, well, underwhelmed.

It has a fantastic cast, Branagh as Frankenstein, Robert De Niro as the Monster, Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth and a slew of other great actors of the period, but that couldn’t put the film over the top leaving it as just a couple of hours of entertainment.

I think there’s an element that James Whale and the four writers of the 1931 Universal classic Frankenstein got correct that many later editions failed at and that is getting straight to the point of the story.

The 1931 film opens with Frankenstein’s fiancé concerned because she hasn’t seen her love in sometime. After collecting a mutual friend and an old instructor they head to his lab and barge in on the night of creation. Bam! We’re off and running.

1994’s adaptation returns to the novel’s framing device of an arctic explorer coming across Frankenstein, near death, and hear the tale told as flashback. (A flashback that violates Point of View with Frankenstein recounting details of scenes he never witnessed, but the novel does this as well.) We sit though extended sequences of Frankenstein’s life, his loves, his slowly building obsessions until finally we get to him creating life.

The truth of the matter is we don’t care about the backstory. It holds no suspense. Ask nearly anyone what happens in Frankenstein and they’ll tell you a scientist makes a living monster from dead body parts. This exploration of growing obsession is pointless. We know where he ends up, we know what he is going to do, and unless you have invented a unique take wholly divorced from the source material, you’re just boring us while we wait for the subject matter that brought us to the theater.

 

Share