Paul Kirsch

I have a problem with the Twilight phenomena, but it has nothing to do with vampires that walk in sunlight. It’s how we’ve allowed ourselves to feel threatened as result of it.

Poke around on the internet and you’ll find  scathing reviews of Breaking Dawn beyond count. They seem to play the same tune: 2 hours of longing glances, no plot, and brooding, one-dimensional characters. There’s an addendum to these that catches my attention. People seem very occupied with the message of the Twilight series. A lot of thoughtless accusation is aimed at Stephenie Meyer: that she’s indoctrinating young women into thinking that life is pointless without a boyfriend, one should be willing to give up everything for obsessive love, sex is terrifying and painful, and childbirth is a trip through Hell.

Another thing we’ve done over the years is compare Twilight with the Harry Potter series, for no other reason than both were wildly successful at getting kids to lug around Melvillian-sized tomes.

At the height of popularity, we had extremists and naysayers banning Harry Potter and calling for J.K. Rowling’s head as a confirmed practitioner of the dark arts. They imbued one British author with the power to convert a nation full of children to Satanism. I can’t help but feel that we never gave this Chicken Little ignorance the attention it deserved. Are we allowed to turn around and ask how many children are standing in pentagrams and summoning Azmodan as a result of reading about the adventurers of Mr. Potter? I wonder how many feel silly about their accusations in retrospect. I wonder how many of them actually read the books, and if they enjoyed them.

Here’s where the matter gets ironic. Now we have another literary sensation in Twilight, and the same thing is happening from the opposite angle. Only instead of the extreme godmongers shouting until they’re blue in the face, the socially-minded are the new madmen.

Does anyone actually think that Stephenie Meyer is out to get your preteen girls? Does anyone actually think that a generation will pattern themselves off of Bella?

Twilight is not a moral compass. It is not a prevailing cultural identity. Like voodoo, it only has as much power as we invite into our lives. I’m less concerned about the influx of babies named Bella and Edward than I am the Jermajestys and Blankets, who make Bella and Edward seem downright ordinary.

Now, with that said, let’s get mad at Twilight for the right reasons. Let’s get mad because Bella Swan doesn’t carry the weight of complexity or inner-strength to hold her own as a protagonist. Let’s get mad at the craft of this monster. Attacking its morals will only land a glancing blow across oily scales. If we can come to terms with why these books don’t work, then we strike the heart of the beast. The attacks we’ve fired so far have felt directionless, as if we couldn’t agree on what pissed us off more. Look to the writing! Learn from it, and do better! We’ve spent ages refining the process of literary storytelling to arrive at this form. We have a very good understanding of how it works. Stephen King said in On Writing that you can learn more from bad fiction than good fiction, and a book like The Bridges of Madison County can teach you more about writing than a master’s program. Let’s take up the challenge — not because it threatens our young — but because we can do better.

Twilight is not our literary revolution. It will not redefine how we approach writing or cinema. And it will not make a generation of young women into boy-crazy, lackluster facades of humanity. So stop your worrying, or you might feel silly about it tomorrow. Instead, join me at the box office. I’ll be armed with a hip flask and a notebook, ready to learn and to laugh, not necessarily in that order.

Posted in Writing

A couple of years ago, George Mann took the Steampunk genre by storm when he introduced us to Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes, detectives in the service of Queen Victoria. Theirs is not the London of history books. It is a zombie-ridden, clockwork monstrosity on the brink of ruin, and I tear through every page as though it were my last.

The latest book in the series is “The Immortality Engine.” Queen Victoria is long past her prime. In fact, she should have died ages ago, but a disgusting breathing apparatus and tanks of foul preservatives are keeping the mad Queen perched on her throne. “The Immortality Engine” demonstrates the lengths she will go to maintain her unholy existence, and how it conflicts with the loyalties of our intrepid investigators.

Opium, androids, explosions, androids, dirigibles and opium. George Mann has got the right idea. He knows how to manipulate the Steampunk genre to some of its best potential.

My complaints are minor. There’s been a zombie plague in London for months, and somehow it hasn’t spread beyond the lower classes? I’m honestly enjoying myself too much to care, and no logic or genre expectations will get in the way of my admiration for Ms. Hobbes and Mr. Newbury. I also have faith that the author knows what he’s doing, as he’s proven himself more than capable of tying things up in a neat, Rowling-like fashion.

Good show, old boy!

Posted in Reviews

As a writer of things strange and unusual, I often have to research topics that are stranger and more unusual than I would immediately guess. This leads to a great deal of complication in my daily productivity. Anyone who sets foot in the bog of Wikipedia can promise that once you start following links, they lead you down some pretty life-changing paths. And every once in a while, I learn something about the world that, for a variety of reasons, scares the hell out of me.

Which is why I’m starting a new series of posts: DOES ANYONE ELSE KNOW ABOUT THIS?

The intentions of DAEKAT are threefold:

1) To entertain.

2) To figure out how I’ve overlooked some of the world’s most staggering and overwhelming truths.

3) To help us all become better citizens of the Universe. I’ll explain this one in a minute.

Galaxies are BIG — so awfully, frightfully big that I probably shouldn’t think about them as much as I do. The spaces between galaxies? I know enough not to go there. People are so preoccupied with the possibility of life on other planets, but that’s not even a blip on the radar compared to the stuff out there.  How the size of it all dwarfs the span of our imagination.

Ponder this during traffic jams, and feel content at the truth of yourown insignificance. I’m willing to bet it’s saving me a fortune on therapy. Or it’s giving my future therapist a headache. Either way.

And along these lines, I submit for your approval: Galaxy Filaments.

Does anyone else know about this?

Across the Universe, there are vast chains of galaxies, superclusters (thousands of galaxies packed together), and Lyman-alpha blobs (massive concentrations of gas) spanning anywhere from 50-80 megaparsecs in length. For those of you who know your Star Wars terminology, a parsec is about 3,262,000 light years long. A megaparsec is one million of those.

I have a problem with these galactic filaments. I’ve managed to survive nearly 27 years of life without encountering any. How is a citizen of the cosmos supposed to keep up? It’s like being born in the United States and taking for granted free speech or the right to bear arms. It’s like suddenly forgetting you have hands, and picking up a fork with your mouth.

Carl Sagan, not even you could have prepared me for this!

Galactic filaments are the largest known cosmic structures in the Universe, and they passed me by without a glance. This is a grave injustice that I, working very closely with my contacts at the Internet, intend to rectify.

Is anyone else disturbed or intrigued to know know that there is a spider web of matter stretching an unfathomable distance over our heads?

That’s the point of DAEKAT in a nutshell.

Seriously though, did anyone else know about this?

Sleep tight, readers. I know I won’t.

“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! …Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse…Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him…”

~H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Posted in DAEKAT

“The huge man in dark clothes soared up out of the leaves, taller and yet taller. He grew like a tree. He put out branches that were hands. He stood framed against the Halloween Tree itself, his outstretched arms and long white bony fingers festooned with orange globes of fire and burning smiles. His eyes were pressed tight as he roared his laughter. His mouth gaped wide to let an autumn wind rush out.

‘Not treat, boys, no, not Treat! Trick, boys, Trick! Trick!‘

They lay there waiting for the earthquake to come. And it came. The tall man’s laughter took hold of the ground and gave it a shake. This tremor passed through their bones, came out their mouths. And it came out in the form of still more laughter!

They sat up amid the ruins of the thrashed-about leaf pile, surprised. They put their hands to their masks to feel the hot air leaping out in small gusts of echoing mirth.

…

‘Is this what you used to do on Halloween?’ asked the Witch.

‘This, and more. But let me introduce myself! Moundshroud is the name. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. Does that have a ring, boys? Does it sound for you?’

It sounds, the boys thought, oh, oh, it sounds…!

Moundshroud.

‘A fine name,’ said Mr. Moundshroud, giving it a full sepulchral night-church sound. ‘And a fine night. And all the deep dark wild long history of Halloween waiting to swallow us whole!’”

Posted in Uncategorized

I’ve noticed a trend in my reading lately that has undoubtedly always been there, and I’m only now realizing the ultimate relevance. Namely: the importance of plots.

I’m not talking about plots in the dry sense of the word. “One man travels to a secluded island to find a missing girl and uncovers a pagan conspiracy.” I mean a literal plot. A scheme. A planned action by a (group of) individual(s) to steal, spy, overthrow, or otherwise infiltrate an overbearing *insert antagonist here.*

In science fiction and fantasy, it’s par for the course that you find a lot of heavy-stakes plotting. Hobbits carrying rings, Jedi overthrowing Sith, con men lying their way into buildings while someone snags a grappling hook on the far wall. That isn’t to say that a plot is in any way secluded or unique to one way of reading. However, speculative fiction as a whole has a way of taking the arguments on good craft that apply to most other fiction, and blowing them up to the size of parade floats.

Hence the fun of it all.

A plot can teach you everything you need to know about compelling fiction:

1) The Incentive. Someone stole a diamond, and the protagonist has to steal it back. They undoubtedly have a stake in the plot, else they wouldn’t have any part of it. So you craft a sense of motivation, a starting point for the character in question, and have a goal that moves the story forward.

2) The Scheme. This is a character’s first draft of how to steal back the diamond. It is undoubtedly flawed in ways that they cannot predict, or depends on other factors that they have yet to secure (i.e. “If we’re going to get through that wall, we need an expert in explosives. I know just the man…”).

3) The Anti-Scheme. As a writer, you’ve demonstrated the breadth of the character’s knowledge. Now swivel the narrative lens to someone who errs on the Mordor side of Middle-Earth. Someone who can disrupt the plot, or god forbid, knows about it in advance. This gives the reader a privileged sense of urgency, the nightmarish feeling of powerlessness, yet they have to look anyway to see how it pans out.

4) The First Try. This is where it gets really fun. A good plot should never work on the first try. Something goes wrong in a big way. Maybe it was a trap all along, someone changed their flight, or Lando Calrissian sold your characters to the Empire just when things were looking good. Either way, there’s a completely unanticipated setback. The reader’s confidence builds in the characters as they see them improvising to save their lives.

5) Regroup at the Rally Point! “Okay, that didn’t work. We didn’t exactly get what we were looking for, and one of us was taken captive, but now we know something we didn’t know before.” Enough said.

6) The Revised Scheme, And So Forth.

I’d bet my shoes that you’ve read at least a dozen books that worked this way in the last year, less than half of them involved ray guns, and some of them went no farther than the old family manor. Barring some experimental fiction, it is a truth universally aknowledged that your characters will declare their intentions and will be proven at least partially wrong. Fiction is the way in which their wrongness holds them back, and how the consequences move them forward.

While I won’t wholeheartedly argue that writing with this formula in your back pocket is the way to go, it can serve as an extremely helpful prophylactic to some of the most basic writing pitfalls: “I don’t understand why he would do that.” A plot makes your character’s intentions crystal clear, their every shortcoming a devastation, their sympathy palpable. These are abstractions to be used responsibility. Good advice, not a way of life.

Posted in Writing

Like us, only more so. Robots can demonstrate our most delicate sensibilities, or harden their clockwork hearts into soulless killing machines.

“I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself.” ~Bishop, Aliens 

By the very premise of its existence, a robot is not in control of its destiny. A robot was created for a purpose, and its functionality beyond that purpose is limited. They are not brought up with an understanding of choice. Their design is geared toward their intended use. Why let a robot taste or smell when it’s only intent is to drill processors into motherboards? They may dream [of electric sheep], but their dreams are seldom fulfilled. If they find “success,” it is often with the realization of a new dream.

origins from Robert Showalter on Vimeo.

Robots depend on external factors to keep themselves moving—spare parts, a power source, etc. Not so different from humanity in this respect, but the point is compounded to the nth degree. A story seldom grinds to a halt because a character is hungry, whereas a robot’s story is all but finished if it winds down. They are a constant Icarus subjected to the shortcomings of their nature, or lack thereof.

The killing robot is an interesting case because so often they bear the closest semblance to their human counterparts. James Cameron’s Terminator is a fitting depiction: the bare skeleton, stripped of individuality, polished and honed to flawlessness. A figure given over to nothing but the practicality of the hunt, even mocking death in its Charon-like depiction.

By contrast, the short film The Second Renaissance, a prequel to The Matrix, shows the steady decline of robots shedding their humanity out of hatred and practicality, seeking to craft a more efficient form than that of their previous masters.

“I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.” ~Brother Cavil, Battlestar Galactica

A character who breaks this mold and never ceases to amaze me is Futurama’s Bender. One would think that Bender’s name says it all: he bends things, discussion over. While Bender certainly has a knack for his intended purpose, he’s really a Swiss army knife of unfolding possibility. I’ve witnessed him serving as a can opener, brewery, refrigerator, card shuffler, film projector, stapler and credit card scanner. Of all his functions, he excels at bending our preconceived notions of the common robot.

Like a good Twilight Zone episode, robots exaggerate the beauty and horror of humanity. They showcase the ultimate expression of how wonderful and terrible we can be. With this in mind, Bender is a truly unique example. His functions are limitless, and his only obvious restrictions are tied to his vices (he runs on hard alcohol). As a result, a robot is often the most human character on the screen.

Posted in Uncategorized

You don’t have to tell me twice! I know. I know. I’ve been occupied of late. In lieu of a big post about one book, I’m going to do a small post about many books.

First, George R.R. Martin released his epic continuation to A Song of Fire and Ice. I let my family and friends know that I would forsake them in favor of reading it, and I didn’t disappoint. There were laughs, grins, swords, dark wings and everything in between. It was a George Martin book. I can’t say too much, because some very dear and precious people I know won’t get caught up with the series this side of the century. I’ll say this to the fans (in abstract terms): Cersei’s champion has been on my mind since A Feast for Crows. That secret plot is an ace up George’s sleeve, and I sit up at night, dreamless, wondering how it will play out.

Geek rant finished.

Deborah Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches was inflicted upon me with the best of intentions. I didn’t approach it with that pre-conceived hatred of the vampire romance that has grown so fashionable. Having read 100 pages of Twilight and watched the lion’s share of Buffy, I can say I’ve seen the genre at its best and at its worst. I’ll let you decide which was which. I wish I had more time to dissect the craft of it, because A Discovery of Witches turned its back on so many essential elements of world-building and character sympathy that I simply seek to understand *why.* Certain writing conventions are commonplace not because they’ve been done before, but because they actually do work quite effectively. I wonder if this book set out to break a mold, but ended up just ignoring good advice.

Wild Cards stood on the periphery of my attention because there are something like 21 books in the series already, and who can get invested in that? Oh no. The first anthology is available in digital form for the price of overpriced coffee, and its worth cannot be measured in beans. Wild Cards is a superhero story done right, where the post-WWII chicken in every pot lifestyle gets interrupted by an alien virus. Wild Cards shines in its contributors. Each story is done by a different science fiction/fantasy author — many names you know, some you don’t. It reminds me of when I read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics in high school, where a different artist illustrated every story. The tones changed, the players moved around a little differently, but there was always a common harmony in the backdrop.

Here’s to hoping we don’t wait as long for my next post. Cheers, kindly readers!

Posted in Reviews

Daniel Craig is an odd duck.

I don’t take this from reading any gossipy articles about his daily pursuits. Rather, the trajectory of his creative decisions have caught my attention. When he featured as the latest Bond, I thought he was destined to become the next flesh sacrifice to the golden calf of the mainstream. A handsome smile for the next gazilliondy romantic comedies. Then he made an unexpected move: playing Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass (a movie that few seemed to enjoy as much as I did…). For an actor on his upward path, accepting a young adult pseudo-steampunk fantasy was an unexpected direction. A welcome direction. Later, when I saw him take up the lead for Cowboys vs. Aliens, I thought “Of course it’s Daniel Craig!”

Brad Dourif is an odd duck.

You’ve seen him in The X-Files, Star Trek, Deadwood, David Finch’s love-to-hate-it Dune, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and every horror movie you could shake a stick at. His career is based upon supernatural emotionality, and a creep factor that makes Charles Manson hesitate. You have not seen the last of Brad Dourif. At some point or another you invited him into your home, and such a force is not easily dismissed.

Adrian Brody is an odd duck.

This one took me by surprise. While The Pianist took a piece of my soul and sliced it open with piano wire, dear Adrian took a different path than I expected. Did anyone see The Jacket? How about Splice? In no uncertain terms, that shit was weird! So it was no surprise when he showed up in a reboot of the Predator franchise. I heartily anticipate his next foray into the weird.

These men are on friendly terms with the strange and unusual. They hitched their wagons to U.F.O.s and planted their careers on Indian burial grounds. This can only get better. And weirdness only improves with age.

Christopher Lee is the king of odd ducks. He portrayed Dracula, Lord Summerisle, Saruman the White, Mister Flay, and that awesome geneticist from Gremlins 2. His voice is the final echo in your nightmares. He was old when the world was young. He played chess with Death, his white pieces carved with human finger bones, and won. Christopher Lee once threw a live cat at the Moon. It landed safely, and resides there happily to this day.

These people are precious to us, though we might not always realize it. Whatever shadow lurks behind their eyes, it is a growth that needs to be fostered, nurtured, and cared for like flowers in a graveyard.

Weirdness improves with age. Within a select few young people lurk the souls of demented old men. Watch out for them. They could be your friends or neighbors. Maybe even members of your own family. They could be closer than you know. You think that bearded fellow is an odd duck now? Give him a few years. Just don’t expect a swan.

Posted in Uncategorized

The Sci-Fi channel is currently showing the last moments of an Indiana Jones marathon. I watched to the end of Last Crusade and turned it off, as any warm-blooded American should. Moments ago, I flipped to the end of Crystal Skull to see if anything better was coming on after it (nope). More importantly, I witnessed a scene that underlined a feature of world-building that makes me tear at my scalp every time I come across it:

Elaborate fucking doors.

In order to reach the inner sanctum of the alien…council…whatever they were doing there, Indy had to press the crystal skull into a conveniently skull-shaped recess. There followed an extended trial of grinding gears, weights, pulleys, counterweights, sliding locks and bolts in an impressive display of…let’s face it, they were opening a goddamn door.

I feel like no one has addressed this problem, but it seems endemic to every form of entertainment that a barrier has to be as complex and impressive as its contents.

Even the first Harry Potter movie suffers this indignity. Hagrid pokes some key points on a wall in order to open the way to Diagon Alley, and the audience has to sit through (I’m ballparking the numbers) a good fifteen seconds of bricks folding into each other and forming an archway.

So let’s talk about what’s happening. The author / filmmaker is using a showy display in order to convey the artifice and ingenuity of whoever built the door in question, and consequently, whatever mysteries lie on its far side. They’re also injecting the scene with the gravity of a previously impassable barrier being passed, of ancient secrets and answers to all questions unveiled.

They’re also wasting my time by opening a door.

No wonder Diagon Alley has about eighty different entrances. People got sick of using that brick wall that took forever to open! Talk about a commute to work.

My point is this: the intentionality behind a flashy entrance is being eclipsed by the consequences. By logic. Is an advanced society really so advanced if it takes them fifteen minutes to get through the foyer? When they drafted the blueprints to their society, why did they leave Rube Goldberg in charge of the hinges?

Allow me to make this mole hill into a mountain, but if the front door of this society takes a long and arduous physics equation in order to open, what must the rest of their technology resemble? How long does it take to boot up Windows 7 when their best security measure involves marbles and rolling slabs of stonework that rotate to form a bas-relief?

It’s not working, folks. Try to be economic with your script pages, your word count, and your special effects budget for a change. Is anyone really impressed by the effort?

If I could sit through a six-hour montage of every elaborate door in every movie I would ever see for the rest of my life–simply to spare my future self the torment of having to interrupt an otherwise decent movie with a minute of door openings–I would still choke on my vomit and pass out halfway through.

And what art school dropout keeps designing these portico nightmares? Does he scratch his pencil-thin goatee, shake his head and say: “No, this entrance demands a system of live owls hooting into shofars,” and the producers say “Ooo” and “Ahhh” while they scribble on notepads? This has to be limited to one guy who keeps drawing on his one “good” idea, beating the same stillborn horse.

I won’t take it anymore, and I can promise you this, readers: Every door I write about is going to resemble a door you’ve walked through before, because doors are the capstone of civilization. Once you’ve got a front door, you know your society is on the right path. It’s the next step above fire. Let’s face it, even the door to Moria and the Black Gates of Mordor opened without much fanfare (once Gandalf remembered the password), and they had magic at their disposal. The only occasion I can fathom to write a door in the shape of a Rubik’s cube would be a society entirely composed of bastards, and I don’t hold their custom. Good day sir.

Posted in Uncategorized