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

Streaming Review: The Bombardment

 

A Danish/Netflix co-production The Bombardment is dramatization of an RAF raid that mistakenly bombed a religious school in addition to the target the national headquarters for the Gestapo.

In March 1945 the Danish resistance feared that the Gestapo were on the verge of destroying Netflixtheir organization and after much pleading and the Gestapo’s use of captured resistance member as human shields the RAF launches Operation Carthage, a daring low-level raid to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen.

The Bombardment, titled The Shadow in my Eye in Denmark, uses fictional characters to explore the events leading up to and immediately following the raid.

Henry – a young boy traumatized by an aerial attack he witnessed and now with a crippling fear of open skies and psychosomatic muteness.

Rigmor — Henry’s cousin and a very self-assured and outgoing young girl. Henry comes to live with her in the city where he can better grapple with his fear of the open sky.

Eva — Rigmor’s younger friend who has also witnessed the brutality of the war.

Teresa — a nun in training and teacher at the school whose faith has been damaged by the horrors of the war.

Frederick – a young man collaborating with the occupying Nazis who becomes infatuated with Teresa.

The Bombardment does a fine job capturing the daily life of the people of Copenhagen as they deal with both the tedium of normal life alongside with the terror and brutality of German occupation. The film’s opening text establishes the coming disaster giving the normal daily life a cloud of impending doom.  It also does a fair representation of the tragic accident that led several of the bombers in the flight to attack the school instead of their intended target. While characters grow and change by their encounter with the bombing the film actually leans back from making any grand statement about war, leaving such conclusions to each viewer’s own interpretation. While not a film I will revisit or even find terribly memorable The Bombardment is competently constructed and does not overstay its welcome.

The Bombardment streams on Netflix.

Share

The Senate is Kherson

 

In the last week Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson from the murderous Russian forces while in the United States the Democratic Party not only retained control of Senate but quite possibly expanded their number, while limiting fascistic GOPers to very limited gains within the House of Representatives.

Yes, I am drawing a direct and clear parallel between the Russian butchery in Ukraine and the attempts to end American Democracy. If this upsets someone, I don’t care. American Democracy is far from perfect but by the blood, toil, and death of patriots it has expanded until the current incarnation of the Republican party devoted itself to self-serving sanctimonious power over liberty. American Democracy is something I will defend unlike those lying false pretenders.

The liberation of Kherson is not the end of the Ukrainian war, it is like Operation Torch in the European theater but one step closer to that victory, not the victory itself. And the same with the election. The Senate was saved and the House crippled but the war wages on, Berlin lies ahead for our democratic army not behind us.

The Japanese Emperor surrendered his nation and saved his people from a devastating invasion and from incalculable death while the mad men of Nazi Germany clung to their evil dreams and destroyed their nation. So, it will be with the Modern Republican party. The evil men now with their rigor mortis clenched fingers on the tiller will not surrender their controls, they will not save their people but rather insist that sacrifice everything to save the leaders’ precious bank accounts. This is an electoral war of destruction and until the GOP is burned to the ground and rebuilt it will go on.

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

My 2024-2025 Nightmare Scenario

 

A disaster in 2025 is possibly being laide next week here in 2022. Next week throughout the country vital positions in government are being contested by conspiracy-minded election deniers. Should they win offices in enough future battle groups states then they will be able to subvert our constitutional republic in the presidential elections of 2024.

It will not take many victories to place into vital offices, such as various Secretaries of State to make it possible for these antidemocratic Republicans to either submit a slate of electors of their own choosing or simply submit none at all. Either way with the battleground states at the tipping point thy would be able to install a wholly illegitimate Republican president, one that is very likely to be again Trump.

We would begin 2025 with a president who not only lost the popular votes but only by corrupt means installed into office. The souther enslaving states declared their secession from the Union because Lincoln won the presidency without a single Southern electoral vote but the election itself was seen as legitimate. The election and installing of an illegitimate president will be a magnitude worse.

When this corrupt presidency issues executive orders and action what will be the reaction of the deep blue Democratic states? Will California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and others ‘bend the knee’ to the white house?

I doubt it.

Will they honor the Supreme Court when its social conservative majority rules against them?

I doubt it.

There you have the shattering of our Constitutional Republic.

There you have the end of the Union.

Next Tuesday the future is in your hands, choose wisely.

Share

Spooky Movie #8: Doctor Sleep

 

Doctor Sleep adapted from Steven King’s novel of the same name is a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film The Shinning. (Also adapted from a Steven King novel.) I have read the novel The Shinning a few times and found it to be one of King’s most effective horror stories and like King I Warner Brothers Studioswas disappointed by Kubrick’s adaptation feeling that it missed the essential possession element of the work. I never got around to reading King’s sequel so I can’t speak to this film faithfulness as an adaptation.

With clever casting writer/Director Mike Flanagan picks up the story shortly after the events of The Shinning with Danny Torrance and his Mother Wendy living in Florida, both terribly scarred by the trauma that they have survived. The ghost of the hotel’s chief chef Hallorann visits Danny and helps him to master his psychic abilities.

Despite this when we catch up with Danny as an adult, he is a broken man and, like his father before him, suffering from bouts of rage and alcoholism.

Simultaneously A young girl, Abra Stone, is coming into her own as a psychic with her own special and power shine which brings her into the awareness of a cult of psychic vampires that feed of the essence released by tortured and murdered psychics lead by the sadistic Rose the Hat.

Very quickly Danny finds his path to sobriety and redemption runs straight through Abra and Rose, a path that leads all of them back to haunted Overlook Hotel.

Doctor Sleep is in fact my first experience with the work of Mike Flanagan, and I was quite impressed. The film has a simple yet deep production design that carries both a sense of real world reality while suggesting a deep unseen reality beyond just what is visible. Films about psychic abilities are always a tricky magic act to perform. By their very nature psychic talents are things of the mind and they do not generally lend themselves to effective visualizations. Flanagan manages to walk the narrow path of visual that are interesting and unreal while still not leaving the viewer lost or confused.

The cast is uniformly good, Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance always carries the haunted look of a man barely functioning despite the pain that clearly tormenting him. Kyleigh Curran as Abra has real talent and will be a treat to hopefully watch her blossom into an adult actor. that said for me the real treat was Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat. Having missed nearly all of the Mission Impossible franchise I was only recently introduced to her work in Dune Part 1as the Lady Jessica but her villainous turn as Rose is truly breathtaking. Playing a person of so little empathy is a very tough gig, overplay it and it ceases to be a character and dwindles into caricature underplay it and the threat begins to fade. Ferguson found the balance keeping her real, keeping Rose’s pain visible while maintaining the hardness that made her frightening.

Thew film’s climax at the Overlook was particularly satisfying especially for fans of the original novel.

Doctor Sleep is currently streaming on HBOMax and is available on VOD.

Share

Trans is not the New Ban Gay Marriage It’s Worse

 

In 2004 GOP backed initiatives in 11 states passed banning ‘gay marriage.’ During the early 2000s the Republicans repeatedly and consistently placed on local and state ballots initiatives to ‘ban gay marriage’ as a method to energize their base and play upon long held but weakening prejudices. There were enough ‘moderate’ voters holding to those bigotries that winning some of them over could swing elections.

When the current Republican led tirade against Trans people surfaced first surfaced, I thought it was a similar ploy. The ‘Gay issues’ had been settled at the courts and what followed surprisingly quickly was a sea change in public opinion. The ‘ban gay marriage’ movement had been corralled to the most bigoted and no longer held the potential of electoral victory. Trans people, still only a concept to many people and outside of common perception, might hold the key to again energizing the GOP’s base voters while winning over a few of the undecided middle. I do think that the ‘bathroom bills’ and such was a repeat play of the ‘gay marriage’ tactics of the early 2000s, but it has moved far beyond that now.

Following the trail blazed by the former president the GOP now seeks cruelty for its own sake and not merely as an after effect. They now longer couch their arguments and plans in bland inoffensive sounding language but instead drive directly to harmful, cruel, and targeted attacks on Trans people and their families vis the power of the state. From Texas to Florida and beyond the state wielding the terrible club of criminal action batters at a group already heavily marginalized, bullied, beaten, and murdered.

When you combine this with the active plot to destroy representative democracy it is clear that there are no good Republicans left.

Share

Spooky Movie #7: Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb

 

Released by Hammer Studios in 1971 Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars.

An expedition lead by Professor Fuchs locates and robs the tomb of an Egyptian sorceress, Tera, condemned by the priests of her time for her evil and her magics. Fuchs, obsessed with Hammer StudiosTera’s legend brings her well preserved corpse by to England while the rest of the expedition makes off with sacred artifacts from the tomb. Just before her birthday Fuchs’s gives his daughter Margaret one Tera’s artifacts instigating a chain of events that may lead to the evil sorcerer’s re-birth.

Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb had a quiet troubled production. It’s original star as Fuchs, Peter Cushing, completed only one day of shooting before his wife’s medical emergency forced him to quit the movie. Five weeks into the six weeks of principal photography the film’s director, Seth Holt, died of a sudden heart attack.

The movie has all the elements of a slow-burn horror film, the gradually escalating stakes, likeable characters caught in the morass of doom and destiny, hubris and pride pulling everyone towards what appears to be a grisly end, but ultimately the production failed to hit this target.

The cinematography is bright and clear, too clear, displaying the sets in such detail that their simple nature becomes evident. The acting overall is credible, but it appears that Valerie Leon in the dual role of Tera/Margaret had her voice replaced and the dubbing is quite terrible. Personally, I found the fake eyelashes that make applied to Valerie Leon quite distracting and spoiled every close-up of her and even hampered her performance. I really wish I could have heard her own performance rather than this crudely pasted voice-replacement.

The rest of the cast, including Andrew Keir replacing Cushing, are perfectly fine if sometimes a little on the nose casting wise. All of the expedition actors play both their younger tomb robbing selves and the same characters 18 years later with touches of old age make-up.

While this movie doesn’t lean heavily into the permissive nudity found in other 70s Hammer productions such as The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil it does play more towards the heaving bosoms, clearing teasing the male gaze, than earlier films.

Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb is fairly typical of late period Hammer. An interesting idea for a film hampered by budget and scheduling but not entirely a waste of your viewing time.

Share