There’s a blanket assumption supported by the nerd-run media that you have to be either a Star Trek or Star Wars fan. Anyone with a pair of graphing calculators to rub together will tell you that this isn’t the case, and that we approach the franchises for very different reasons.

I discovered Star Trek late in the game for my generation. I flipped the TV to the Sci-fi channel (when it was still the Sci-fi channel) as background noise while I trudged through a quagmire of high school calculus, and found myself in the midst of a Voyager marathon. I glanced up to catch  what was happening every few minutes. At length, the interims between unfocused me and attentive me narrowed, until I found that I had sat, enraptured and unblinking, for the entire two-part saga entitled Year of Hell.

People roll their eyes when I speak of my affection for Voyager. The greater nerd community seems to think that I missed out because I don’t have a solid grounding in Next Generation. While I have to admit that Seven-of-Nine’s bodysuit struck my hormones like a tuning fork — I still genuinely feel that I had every bit of an enriching Star Trek experience for more dignified, creatively-inspired reasons.

Plot
With the advent of Lost, I’m seeing an increasing quantity of shows that demand a viewer’s uninterrupted devotion from day one. Star Trek is the high watermark of episodic content. You can dip your toes into any point of the series and find yourself in familiar territory. They’re still in space, Klingons are still out of touch with their emotions, and the Borg are still philosophically unsettling. Most of the substantial changes occur on a one-off basis.

One could tear this argument to ribbons by asserting that the Star Trek universe is simplistic and unvarying. I’d argue that the high-stakes subplots and a thin sense of continuity between episodes makes up for it.

The Prime Directive
The Prime Directive is a galactic law stating that the Federation (Good Guys) shall not interfere with any planet’s conflicts in a way that could tip the balance. The charm of the Prime Directive is that no one has followed it in years. There’s a constant ethical battle that goes something like this:
“Captain! We can’t interfere! The Prime Directive–”
“Don’t quote Federation law to me, Ensign! I was breaking the Prime Directive before you were born. Fire photon torpedoes!”
“…Yes, Ma’am.”
It’s as if the Federation wanted to give starship Captains a reason to become vigilantes, and wrote a law that –by its very design — would have to be broken. I’ll bet they had webcams installed on all the bridges, and somewhere on Earth a room full of starchy NASA Control scientists cheered and popped champagne bottles every time another Captain broke the Prime Directive. They probably gambled on it. “Janeway’s about to crack!”

Heightened Ship-Awareness (this one is my favorite)
After a few weeks of saturating myself in Voyager, I realized that I could pilot a Federation starship as effectively as any officer. When shit got real, I instinctively knew where power needed to be re-routed, what systems to target on an enemy vessel, and what maneuvers would create a quantum paradox that would tear the ship apart. I knew that you were dead in the water if anything happened to your warp core. I knew that if anyone had to go crawling through a duct to re-wire something, they were going to find evidence of sabotage.

Star Trek excelled at continuity and familiarity when it came to wartime tactics. “Do we target weapons or shields? Do we divert power to life support or thrusters? Dismiss that man to his quarters!” The available split-second choices were arranged in different combinations, but they all came from a shared pool of possibility. If you watched enough Star Trek, you got the chance to take part in the decision-making process.

Star Wars never offered this sense of oneness with the technology at play. One of my favorite moments from the series is when Luke stares up at the Millennium Falcon and says: “What a piece of junk!” It’s an amazing line, because the viewer has no context in the Star Wars universe to judge one spacecraft from another. That moment does some great things from a storytelling perspective — demonstrating Luke’s savvy, introducing doubt in Han Solo’s capability, and adding some character to the Falcon herself — but it underlines the fact that Star Wars keeps the viewer at a distance from the nuts and bolts of technology.

Call it “formulaic” if you must. I think formulae work because they speak to our nature. We pattern our lives in all sorts of ways — consciously and unconsciously. In the case of Star Trek, the writers found a way of dredging out of deep space that which is inherently human, and that’s never going to stop being cool.

I’ve been away from this blog long enough that WordPress has changed its interface dramatically, in ways that threaten and frighten my delicate sensibilities. Bear with me on this technical learning curve!

First of all, I have to give major credit to my readers. Nearabouts 3,900 hits in 2011! That may not seem like much to a laughing baby, but every one of you is precious to me. I seldom get to say that I have 3,900 of anything, except maybe legos. My favorite experience by far was when I fought the law and the law won over Boris the Burglar. The support I received after that incident was second only to the novelty of it. Thanks for a great year!

Joe Lansdale grabbed my attention when I read the anthology Steampunk, Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, ed. His story was entitled “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel,” which I found simultaneously horrifying and delightful. Time travel, robots, Morlocks, torture, mutilation, brooding immortals — need I say more? I had crossed his name before, but suddenly I had to know what else he had done. Turns out the man also wrote the original story for Bubba Ho-Tep (included in the following collection). If you haven’t seen that movie, cease reading and get thee to a television now!

Some of the stories in The Best of Joe Lansdale feel warmly familiar, like episodes of The Twilight Zone that took cocaine cut with ground-up glass. Other times he takes you completely off the rails into head-scratching territory.

Joe manages to toe the invisible / imaginary line between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” There’s no reason that some of these stories shouldn’t be taught in English classes, and indeed many of them deserve such treatment. In the same way that Stephen King’s work opens a lens to the culture of Maine, Joe drags a curtain open for the audience to take in a freakshow glimpse of the American South during a brutal historical period. In one sense, these stories serve as a loose biography – you can infer a lot about Joe after reading them. Even if that’s not your thing, it still means that Joe’s writing is infused with the sympathy and understanding of great literary narratives. His points of view stick with you. Even if they come from a different, less safe world than yours, you grow to experience the story on their level, and bring progressively less and less of yourself to the experience.

That’s what I truly take from Joe’s work — the ability to submerge in a unique personality, with none of my prejudices or erstwhile opinions infecting the words on the page. I trust Joe to lead me through the labyrinth, through Hell, and see me out the other side with a few deserved scars and kills to my name.

My thanks to Asher Ellis for the recommendation, with a sincere belief that I’ll be reviewing a collection of his works before long.

Thanks for a great 2011, folks, and here’s to an apocalyptic 2012! You can bet I’ll still post here long after Planet X has turned us all into zombies or at least melted the flesh from my beautiful face. The post-apocalypse will need someone to take care of its literature, and I am more than happy to fill that capacity.

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.

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!

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

“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!’”

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.

 

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.

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!

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.