Category Archives: SF

World-Building is Revealing

.

Whether we are speaking of writing, or gaming, world-building, the process of laying out a fictional environment and how it functions is reveals aspects of the creator’s implicit assumptions about reality.

I noticed this most clearly in Role Playing Games where the world-builder in question is the person who ‘runs’ the game. They established the history, sociology, and politics of their campaign setting and then through the players’ interaction with the world and its peoples reveal their own ideas about how our world really works.

One gamemaster ran campaigns where it was never possible to ‘get ahead’ while obeying the law. For the players to not fall into endless crippling debt, they always resorted to criminality. That person also believed that the world we live in was rigged and that cutthroat selfishness was required to triumph over others.

Another rana Dungeons and Dragons campaign where every evil human had at some point in their backstory had been broken. Evil wasn’t something someone chose but the result of someone ‘snapping.’  This gamemaster sees people as innately good and that evil also has a reason, a cause.

This I think applies to authors as well. There is a well-regarded, award-winning SF author and in every one of the novels they wrote at the heart lies a conspiracy. A cabal of people working in close collaboration for their own benefit and to the harm of the general population. Do I think that this author, whom I have met and is a fine and generous person, believes in whack-a-doodle ideas like ancient aliens, Q-Anon, or that Finland isn’t real? No, but I do suspect that they think that there is coordinated effort where there may simply be convergent goals and methods.

I am sure a careful reading of my own work and games would reveal aspect of myself that I am unaware I had put there. This is an unavoidable effect of world-building. Another author I know works very diligently to not be ‘political’ in their writings and yet their politics are on clear display in the way they craft and utilize their characters. When we create we must draw from ourselves and what we think is real so we cannot but help to have our works reflects some aspect of our true selves.

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 attempts 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.

Share

Movie Review: 65

 

Movie Review: 65

Adam Driver plays a pilot from an alien civilization that crashes on Earth 65 million years ago at the end of cretaceous period and must save himself and his sole surviving passenger while fighting off dinosaurs.

That single sentence description far more action and entertainment than the delivers. I went into the auditorium expecting a fun, mindless, ‘popcorn movie’ but discovered that 65 failed to deliver anything approaching even the barest minimums of engagement. It would be difficult for me to remember a screening that had left me as bored as this one.

Driver’s character, Mills, is given a perfunctory and cliche backstory, presumably to create emotional engagement and to misdirect the audience as to the exact nature of his emotional distress. After encountering another tired, worn, and idiotic cinematic cliche from bad 50’s Sci-Fi films, the ‘uncharted meteor storm,’ his ship is disabled and crashes on cretaceous Earth, an equally ‘uncharted’ planet. The passengers, all in some sort of hibernating sleep capsules, are killed save for the one that will have emotional resonance with Mills. However, this star-faring race with faster than light travel apparently never invented a manifest and so he has no idea who she is, where she’s from, or even which languages she might possibly be familiar with. Now this ersatz father-daughter duo must transverse on foot less than 10 miles to escape this deadly planet.

What should have been a sequence of set pieces with thrills, tension, and scares quickly becomes a tedious pattern of nothing exciting. Oh, Mills and the girl do face danger at every turn but nothing that was supposed to be tense ever possessed the least amount of actual tension. Mills has advanced technology to assist, except for when the scrip requires it to fail, which it does just long enough to cause trouble and then the tech resumes proper function. There is a piece with a waterfall that I honestly thought. “Oh, they ripped this off from the Universal Studio’s ride, and the ride did it better.”

The third act bring in the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid hypnotized to have cause the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, as an additional ‘ticking clock’ and a futile attempt to inject tension into the flaccid fairytale.

Nothing that happens in 65 is in the least bit surprising, original, or even entertaining. It is a movie constructed of bit and bobs from better films and wasted 90 minutes of my limited time on the planet.

Share

I don’t Normally Comment on The Oscars

 

It’s not that I have some great animosity towards the Academy Awards nor is my silence a protest over to whom the awards are presented. There are a great many overlooked films and persons involved in film production with many unjustly not considered for these elaborate peer group affirmations. That’s what all awards are, peer-groups reflecting the pride and prejudices of their times and members expressing collective opinions about what they approved of. These are not objective measures but as with everything associated with the arts subjective impressions and reactions.

A24 Studios

With all that said, it warms my awards cold heart that Everything Everywhere All at Once took home so many of those little golden funny men this year.

EEAO won the Best Picture, Best Director, Supporting Actor and Actress, Lead Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing. That is an impressive sweep and for a genre film that sways from the deeply profound about the existential dread that can lie at the heart of human existence to very silly gags about butt-plug powered martial arts, those wins are ever more impressive and less likely.

It is no secret that in the arts, stage, screen, television, and publishing, genre material, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror is often cast out to a ghetto. All too often the entity of the genre is judged as no better than its worst example. For EEAO to overcome that bias is a true achievement. EEAOwore its genre proudly on its sleeve. There was no fuzziness about its categorization with terms like, ‘elevated horror’ or ‘psychological thriller’ deployed to justify celebrating a horror film such as The Silence of the Lambs. This movie shouted its geekiness and its absurdity while pulling tears from our eyes with the truth that merely living is simultaneously both joy and agony.

We can quibble and debate which person should have won this or that award but for the moment let’s just celebrate that for this brief shining moment genre is seen as equally worthy of respect as any ‘normal’ dramatic tale.

Share

My Strange Relationship with The Last of Us

 

A new prestige television series from the creator of the fantastic Chernobyl? You would think that I would be right there every Sunday evening, devouring the newest episodes.

The truth is that zombies of all stripes have worn rather thin for me, particularly the setting of the zombie apocalypse. Yes, I know that these are not technically zombies, they are not magically reanimated corpses but aggressive, disease-infected individuals. The cast looks

HBO

fantastic and there’s no doubt that the series is winning praise from both within and without of the genre communities. And yet I really am not interested in watching it. I never played the game. Games with prolonged story arcs are less appealing to me due to their intense commitment in time. I play first person shooters, never completing their ‘campaigns’ but simply enjoying the on-line matches against hyper-competent players who nearly always leave me beaten and broken.

So, it sounds like I have no relationship with TLOU, but that’s not accurate either.

Craig Mazin, the principal writer and showrunner, co-hosts a fantastic podcast on screenwriting called Scriptnotes. For Chernobyl he launched a companion podcast for the limited series to help illuminate the history and where the show explored fiction. The podcast was a success and helped promote the series and naturally HBO wanted another for The Last of Us.

So, without watching a single episode of the series, or having played the game one second, I am a devoted listener to the series’ companion podcast.

The podcast features Mazin, Druckman ho was the creative force behind the game and co-runs the series with Mazin, and the voice actor who first gave life to one the game’s and show’s principal characters, Joel. Episodes by episode they break down what happens, why they made the creative decisions that they did in staying true to the game or driving far afield from it, and expounding on, in their view, what makes foe compelling stories.

While I may not be interested in fungal zombies overrunning the world, I am thoroughly and utterly fascinated by the process by which that premise becomes so compelling to so many and the secrets of the story telling craft these men so clearly understand.

Share

Movie: Review M3gan

When the trailers for M3gan dropped I was far from impressed and planned not to see the movie. However, as reports came in from both the horror community and non-horror community that this was actually an entertaining film, I became curious enough to see it. I held my expectations in check though, having remembered that the horror community lost its mind over X, and I found that slasher far from coherent.

M3gan worked and I quite enjoyed myself at last night’s screening. Instead of pursuing a serious realistic tone this screenplay and movie leaned more into camp and irony, leaping to playfulness rather than seriousness to achieve its entertainment.

Cady (Violet McGraw) after becoming orphaned goes to live with her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) who is a genius at artificial intelligence and robots creating robotic toys. Gemma, thrust suddenly into the role of parent, and utterly at a loss as to how to help Cady process her grief, adapts her robot toy project M3gan to assist, imprinting the android on Cady with the directive to protect Cady from harm. Harm having a wide definition and M3gan with a capacity to learn, adapt, and self-program leads to the expected horrific outcomes.

M3gan can be closely compared to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina another film that deals with the complexities of artificial intelligence and androids that develop their own agendas. Where Garland’s film is a serious mediation on the subject, and quite excellent, M3gan utilizes a far less serious tenor to achieve a similar story. Of course, both stories owe a deep debt to Shelly’s Frankenstein as both ex-Machina and M3gan explore in their own manner the responsibility that creators owe their creations.

A quite pleasant surprise in the movie was Ronnie Chang as Gemma’s boss playing a role that while it had comedic elements was not principally devoted to laughter.

Director Gerard Johnstone and writer Akela Cooper managed to violate a few screenplay ‘rules’ about who and what you can kill in a film and not lose the audience, displaying a confidence and skill that elevated the project.

M3gan is fun, campy, and entertaining and is currently still in theaters and available on VOD at ‘theater at home’ pricing.

Share

An Intriguing Start: The Rig

 

January 6th Amazon Prime dropped the first season of its new supernatural thrilled program The Rig on its service. (Not to be confused with the 2010 American Horror movie.)

Starring Iain Glen (Whom many will recognize from Game of Thrones) as Offshore Installation Manager Magnus MacMillan, the program is set aboard the deep-sea drilling platform Kinloch Amazon StudiosBravo as the crew is about to rotate off after a long hard period of working the rig. However, tensions among between among crew between each other and between a representative of the Corporation, Rose Mason (Emily Hampshire) are pushed beyond the breaking point when a series of unexpected and inexpiable events isolates the platform, trapping everyone aboard.

With a large cast The Rig presents the complex, dynamic, and potentially explosive setting of overworked and scared people isolated from all help as they confront dangers without precedent.

Amazon Prime presented The Rig in the ‘binge model’ of distribution, making all six episodes of the premier season available on release. However, neither I nor my sweetie-wife enjoy the full-on a binge and as such we have watched only the first episode. Given that I can properly review an incomplete story I will recount my impression of its opening.

Among the characters populating the series is Fulmer Hamilton (Martin Compston) whose romantic relationship with Rose creates friction and fears of favoritism among the rig workers, Lars Hutton (Owen Teale) a fierce and suspicious rig worker whose distrust of the management and corporation is not utterly unfounded, and Alwyn Evans (Mark Bonnar) the human resources officer caught in the middle of the disintegrating morale.

Filmed entirely in studios in Scotland the series boasts a UK cast with the accompanying array for accents. The digital effects recreating the open seas and the exterior of the platform are most serviceable with only a few shots that have an uncanny unreal valley to them, but they are not enough to shatter the illusion.

I am intrigued enough to continue watching and have hopes that the season will be worth the watch.

Share

Greg Bear Has Left

Greg Bear Has Left

Following complication from surgery, SF author Greg Bear passed away this weekend.

I have read many but not all of his works and found his writing to be clear, smart, and entertaining. Twice I had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with this noted writer, both times at room parties at conventions.

The more humorous chat concerned his novel Anvil of Stars in which a human ship with alien assistance is one a quest to discover and destroy the civilization that annihilated Earth by completely shattering the planet. Being of quite limited means at the time I had purchased my copy of the novel from a used bookstore. (Let us now also mourn the passing to Adamas Avenue Books as well.) Shortly after the characters have launched their won civilization ending vengeance the next several pages confirmed if they had in fact correctly located the guilty party. The several pages that were in fact missing from my copy.

I relayed this to Bear, and he responded with a jesting tone that’s what I deserved for cheating him out of a royalty.

As I said it was in jest and he laughed as he pronounced my sentence. From panel discussions and those who knew him Greg Bear seemed a thoughtful, considerate, and good man. He will be missed.

Share

Series Review: ANDOR

 

First off let me say that posting will be light here for the next few months. I work in the enrollment department of a Medicare Advantage Health Care company and there will be hours and hours and hours of overtime work during this Annual Enrollment Period. Now, onto the review.

Andor is the Disney + series fleshing out the backstory of the character Cassian Andor see in the feature film Rouge One: A Star Wars Story. When the series was announced I was less than enthused and frankly rather skeptical. Cassian was mildly interesting in the film, which I enjoyed, but I felt no burning desire to know him better. When the cast list was released and it was clear there would be no return of everyone’s favorite sassy droid, K2SO, my interest in the series fell even further. With the bland and disappointing The Book of Bobba Fett I very nearly skipped this show.

I am so glad I did not.

Andor is the gritty, morally ambiguous story of the birth of the rebellion and Cassian’s recruitment into it. This is not a redressed fairy tale with knight, wizards, mysticism, and farm boys. Instead, we are dropped into a space opera world that is all too familiar to us. Cassian is a petty criminal, surviving on the edges of the Galactic Empire by selling stollen equipment. The

Disney Studios

oppressive fascistic empire is everywhere and callus in its disinterest towards it subjugated population. The resistance is fracture between zealots, politicians, and thieves. The Intelligence Bureau is a pit of backstabbing careerists, but some are intelligent and talented, presenting a far more real and recognizable threat than cartoonish villainy. The prison labor, its injustice and cruelty, is familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of reality’s greatest incarcerator.

Despite the startling white set, the clean rich apartments of its elite characters, Andor has a very noirish feeling to its story. Again and again characters are forced to compromise their personal morals on the altar of the ‘greater good.’

I adore this series with its rich characterization, its willingness to abandon ‘heroic’ tropes, and get its hands dirtywith the nasty, ugly, violent, and degrading business of revolution.

Share

I Failed My Players

 

Saturday Afternoon/Evening I ran my Space Opera TTRPG for my dear friends and sadly my brain betrayed me, and I achieved none of the tone or mood I has hoped for.

It was not a lack of preparation. I had worked my spreadsheets and gotten all the data collected I would I need, I wrote up an outline of the adventure, the characters, and the goals.

(A brief word on the spreadsheets. Space Opera from FGU came out in the 80s and is a very computation intensive game. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century I have crafted 9 spreadsheets to track the dates, the training, the distances traveled, the fuel used, and many other factors. I am quite proud of these sheets.)

However, when I got to the game, my brain failed completely. I was unable to sequence events properly and barely remained coherent as I ran the session. I ended the session early — was particularly disappointing as we had an unavoidable late start — and barely made it home awake.

I don’t know if it was a rejection, I received earlier in the week that had undermined my morale or a lack of good sleep due to apnea mask issues or some other factor, but it really hurt my weekend. Even more than the migraine I suffered the next day.

I shall have to make sure to not repeat this piss poor performance. I care too much for my players to want to ever have that happen again.

Share

The Shared Fantasy Element of Star Wars & The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

 

On a surface examination it would seem that the pop space fantasy Star Wars and the ground hard sf novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would have very little in common. One is a fairy tale quest reimagined in a galaxy far away taking place long ago while the other is retelling of the American Revolution set on a lunar penal colony.

Both are concerned with the overthrow of a cruel dictatorial government, one a cartoonishly evil emperor the other a multinational penal system condemning the guilty and the innocent.

But both works have a fantasy element in common, an unbelievably restrained set of revolutionaries.

Revolutions eat their young is a common sentiment. In reality, all too often after a successful revolution and the old guard is turned out, usually fatally, the next most common occurrence is the revolutionaries turn on each other. Divisions that had been set aside as they fought a common enemy resurface and what starts as disagreement turns quickly into violence and assassination.

It often takes a stiff spine and stomach to throw a revolution and it’s very easy to drift across the line from moral action into ‘the ends justify the means.’ After that the will to perform ‘questionable’ acts to win is easily turned against former allies.

In both Star Wars and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the revolutionaries are upstanding characters that never got their hands truly dirty. The Empire is toppled and it is all just flowers and puppies and a new Republic is born.  In Moon Manny and his conspirators tried to rig the government so that they remained in power but lacking the blood methods usually employed to neutralize former allies they found themselves outmaneuvered and despite their intent an independent government formed.

I got thinking about this because the newest Star Wars television series Andor is gritty, grey, and morally dark.

I love it.

Andor feels real. It feels like the hard choices and nasty work of throwing a revolution. It flies directly opposed to the fantasy revolt of Star Wars and luckily for continuity it will never reach the post revolution period, but until it ends, I plan to be along for the ride.

Share