1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.

Now, granted, this is not the first time that Pratchett has used his books to touch upon issues of race – really, they’ve been omnipresent throughout most of the Watch books (and I would suggest that, correspondingly, the Moist von Lipwig books thus far are about class, the second divisive social element of a modern society, while the Witches books are about gender; this is not to say that each series doesn’t touch on all of them, of course, because Pratchett doesn’t min-max out his themes, but some books emphasize things more than others), and I’ve seen a few reviewers complain to the effect of “how many times can Terry Pratchett explain to us that racism is bad?” Which is a relatively silly complaint, because the answer is “as many times as there are ways for racism to be bad,” whether it’s using dwarf/troll conflict to discuss interethnic strife in Thud! or exploring propaganda and stereotype-as-weapon in Jingo or the utilization of dehumanization of differing races and [something I won't spoil] in Snuff.

In terms of entertainment value, it’s pretty high. Putting Vimes out in a polite country setting lets Pratchett play with some new tropes, and fans of super-prepared butlers will be glad to see Willikins take a major role in this book. In terms of technique, the pacing is a bit uneven and the occasional aside flounders, but far more often than not Pratchett hits his beats. Snuff is a solid B+ on Pratchett’s grading curve, which is just fine, if a bit of a comedown from the last couple of Vimes books (Night Watch and Thud! are both generally considered among his best).

—

On the other hand, we have Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which has been getting some good press from nerds. This is not shocking, because Ready Player One is the biggest nerd-pander I think I have ever read in my entire life. If you are wondering how big a nerd-pander we are talking about here: this is literally a novel about how a shut-in loser person becomes a megabillionaire superstar because he is good at video games and knows a lot of pop-culture trivia.

And I’m not even spoiling the ending for you because Cline (who writes the entire novel in the hero’s first-person) lets you know, at the very start of the book, that the hero wins and gets to be a megabillionaire superstar. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that the ending of this sort of book is more or less predetermined, but when I read that bit of the book not ten pages in I just put the book down and went “oh, fuck off” because it absolutely kills the suspense for me.

Not that there is a lot of suspense to be had, frankly. Cline’s narrative is engaging enough in a trash-fiction sort of way, but it’s for the most part very straightforward: hero does A, hero does B, hero does C, SETBACK, TRIUMPH, roll credits. The villain of the piece – an evil corporate person, because of course a near-future/cyberspace narrative will have an evil corporate person as the villain – is so ridiculously evil he does everything but twirl a moustache. The love interest turns out to be attractive in real life and just thinks she’s ugly because of an unusual birthmark. (Cline repeatedly does an exceptional job of teasing potential conflict and then dissolving it so quickly that the entire affair seems pointless: there’s actual story in a cyber-affair where one person genuinely has issues that prevent them from having a real-world relationship, but that would get in the way of the by-rote happy ending, I suppose. And he does this more than once.)

But ultimately, the silliness of the story – and the lack of artistry with which it’s written, or if you prefer “its workmanlike prose” – does it in for me. As exceptional a programmer as Programmer MacGuffin might be, I can’t believe that programming would get so easy that this guy would just go ahead and program literal lifetimes’ worth of cyber-quest material all by himself, or that some supa-mega-visionary would just create a decades-long-contest which was masturbating to all the things he liked about his hobbies and nobody would find this weird. And on top of that, said supa-mega-visionary’s hardon for 80′s culture would completely envelop the modern popular culture of the time, so that in 2045 or whatever people would still be talking about how awesome Thundercats was. (This is roughly equivalent to everybody right now deciding that zoot suits are the way to dress for the foreseeable future and excitedly collecting Glenn Miller albums like they were Lady Gaga singles.)

It’s a pity because there are some flourishes of real creativity right at the beginning: Cline’s description of the “stacks,” which are literally vertical towers of RVs and trailers surrounding cities because gas shortages led to people crowding around population centres, is evocative and more creative than most of the rest of his book, and the protagonist’s brief forays into the real world are honestly quite interesting – far moreso than the cyber-worlds he discusses, because all of the virtual realities where the book spends the bulk of its time are warmed-over genre-skinned rehashes of World of Warcraft or EVE Online or both at once. There’s no there there. When Cory Doctorow decided to write a novel about MMORPG gaming, he wrote For The Win, which is really a novel about collectivization of labour and class struggle – you may not like it or its message, but it’s a book with real heft. Ernest Cline, on the other hand, has written a novel with a plotline as thin as the old Atari 2600 Adventure games he references multiple times. It’s a book that decides that the future will entirely be about looking backwards from where we are right now, and isn’t that kind of sad?

She was more than a bit homophobic and her books were uneven at best, but I loved them when I was a kid and I can’t but be sad at her passing – the first woman to ever win a Hugo or a Nebula, the first woman to have a sci-fi book on the New York Times Bestseller List. She was, simply, a giant.

Pantsless Pete: An explanation of how Betty Brant doesn’t come off as creepy in early issues of Spider-man by being a woman in, using the bare minimum of her completing high school and secretarial school, her early twenties hitting on a weird looking seventeen year old.

You know that one episode of South Park where a schoolteacher falls in love with Ike, and whenever anybody describes their relationship to a guy, the guy’s inevitable answer is “…nice.” You know that? It’s like that.

Arthur Robinson: What are your thoughts on podcasting? Like what do you think of the medium? What are your favorite shows? And would you ever start your own?

I’ve guested on Squideye And The Bitter Guy once and guested on a couple of other podcasts, and in terms of the medium I think it’s radio gone indie. Which is fine and good, don’t get me wrong, but some people treat podcasting like it’s this transcendent thing, and really, it’s just radio when you get down to brass tacks.

As for doing my own, I find that unless you’re being paid, you generally either blog or podcast, not both. It’s a time thing.

RAC: Played any interesting new boardgames lately?

I recently got the chance to play Eclipse and was monumentally impressed with it. I think it’s that long-foretold board game: the playable and elegant 4X space game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, for those who don’t know what 4X is). The mechanics are streamlined enough that the game isn’t too hard to learn (although it’s still an advanced game, don’t get me wrong), but there’s an incredible amount of depth, theme and replayability to it. I mean, this is a Euro-styled game where you still get to design your own spaceships a la Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, which is pretty great.

I also played a few games of Ankh-Morpork, which is a fun, fast and light game with a few major design flaws that desperately need to be addressed to make it playable (the most notable of which is that Vimes is simply much more powerful than the other personality-roles players can be).

Oh, and everybody around here is always up for a game of Blood Bowl: Team Manager or King of Tokyo. (Fun fact: any game with “Tokyo” in the title is either about World War II or giant monsters.) BBTM is a great little card game that really carries the theme of “seasons of Blood Bowl” quite well, and KoT is Yahtzee except with giant monsters instead of boring scorepads. Both are excellent.

I’ve got a few longer boardgame posts in draft form, currently. I’ll get back to them at some point.

Crazed Spruce: What fantasy books would you recommend for a person who likes fantasy movies and television, but never really got into fantasy novels?

Standalone fantasy novels tend to be relative rarities – the only author I can think of who does them regularly is Guy Gavriel Kay. Epic fantasy is epic for a reason: they tend to be book cycles rather than individual books. That having been said, The Belgariad by David Eddings is a very good “light” entry into fantasy epics. Even thou fantasy readers will mock the hell out of Eddings for reusing the same plot like six times, it’s like how every ZZ Top song is the same: you’re not there for the plot, you’re there for the dialogue and the eminent fun of the thing. And all those mockers read Eddings and loved him at one point.

If you want to go heavier, in ascending order:

- The Magician/Riftwar cycle by Raymond E. Feist, which is basically the mostly thinly disgused D&D campaign in the history of fiction, but is quite good nonetheless;
- The Servant of the Empire trilogy by Feist and Janny Wurts, which expands off to the side of the Riftwar cycle as a set of standalone books set in a different world (explaining would take a while) and, while heavier than the Riftwar books, are also better;
- The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay is middle-weight and epic and lovely;
- and if you’re going to jump into the deep end right off the bat, just go with George R.R. Martin already and save yourself some time.

And Pratchett, of course, but if you’re going to start reading fantasy anyway, it might be better to save Pratchett until after you’ve read a bunch of the books he’s parodying.

protocoach: What are your thoughts on Aaron Diaz’s reboots of the DC Universe?

I think they’re an admirable creative effort, but are coming from a place that ignores the essential appeal behind the characters in the first place, which is important in any reboot because the point of a reboot is to remind audiences why the character is vital in the first place. Most of Diaz’s reboot ideas are neat and cool, but Superman as some weird energy matrix just isn’t Superman (as DC figured out soon enough). Diaz’s ideas are more akin to the Tangent Universe or “Stan Lee’s Just Imagine” and should be considered accordingly.

Having read it, let me first say that Greg Cox really does do the best he can with the material he’s given. The prose tends towards functional, but he’s writing the dialogue that was in the original crossover. The plot is labored, with big chunks of the early plot given over to exposition, but that’s unavoidable when you have to write up a single novel that begins where DC had spent two solid years building up to. (The opening prologue, where Martian Manhunter watches the monitors in the Watchtower and recaps the events leading up to IC must have made Cox sweat bullets when he wrote it.) The novel is, I think, the absolute best adaptation of ‘Infinite crisis’ possible.

Sadly, though, reading the story without Phil Jimenez’ wonderful art to distract you, the flaws in the story only become more apparent. Which is a shame, because on paper, the basic idea for ‘Infinite Crisis’ is a wonderful one: All the shit in the DC Universe hits the fan at the exact same time. Every single thing goes wrong at once in a perfect example of the catastrophe curve in action; all the villains in the DC Universe organize into a single gigantic gang, the Spectre goes on a mad rampage, killer cyborgs swarm throughout the world wiping out metahumans, cosmic war threatens to engulf the galaxy, and the three most important heroes can’t stop it because they’ve been pushed to their breaking point. Batman’s lost in his paranoia and has actually helped precipitate events, Wonder Woman has lost the balance between hero and warrior, and Superman no longer knows how to inspire a people lost to despair.

And just when things are at their darkest, these figures from pre-Crisis DC step in and say, “This world is broken. The Crisis created a corrupted, debauched reality. We all know things used to be better. You can feel it. Just let us do what needs doing, and we will create a finer universe, the kind that we used to have.” It feels right, in the middle of all this.

Only then you find out that in fact, they’re the ones who have precipitated all this. The chaos, the darkness, the madness and war are all actually the fault of people so blinded by nostalgia that they’ve become the monsters. They’re so determined to recreate a perfect world that never really existed that they will destroy everything that’s real. The heroes find their way by opposing this madness, and the storm breaks. With the crisis over, Earth can begin to heal.

That’s the idea, of course, but the actual story muddles it. The story insists that no, Luthor did nothing to manipulate the heroes into becoming more brutal, paranoid and anti-heroic (except for the Spectre); Luthor’s statement that this Earth is a fucked-up disaster filled with inferior versions of the real DC heroes goes more or less unchallenged. The reader is left with the distinct feeling that Luthor is entirely right, especially as the Big Three heroes are never really allowed any kind of moment where they overcome their tragic flaws and make things right. (Okay, arguably Batman does, when he blows up Brother Eye. But given that Batman’s decision isn’t just flawed but out-and-out villainous, he needs far more redemption than the other two by that point.) Then, when Luthor actually succeeds at recreating the pre-Crisis multiverse (more or less…ish…kinda…) we’re left with the feeling that he may have been right after all. In the end, it feels like nobody’s right and nothing has been resolved, which is not a good ending to a story even in a comic-book universe where you have to put out another book next month.

As I’ve said before, I really do feel like the story only needs minor changes to make it all work. If the Psycho-Pirate had been revealed to be behind events, manipulating the minds of everyone involved to bring them to the point where he can finally bring back the Multiverse he remembers, I think that it would have taken some of the edge off of the unsympathetic actions of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in the story. (As well as resolving some of the major plot holes…can someone really explain to me how Luthor “tricks” General Wade Eiling into working with Captain Nazi, or convinces Black Adam to back Captain Light’s self-righteous “they went too far” act? It all makes a lot more sense if Psycho-Pirate was smoothing things over.)

Even then, the story has flaws; the constant deaths of characters Geoff Johns doesn’t feel are popular enough to survive another crossover aren’t shocking anymore, they’re just irritating. And for all that I’d agree that Superboy-Prime really is the kind of villain who succeeds in making you root like hell against him, he needed his actual comeuppance at the end of the story. Saving him for another crossover was a mistake.

On the whole, I repeat my assertion that this was the best possible ‘Infinite Crisis’ adaptation we could hope for. That’s exactly the problem with it.

I mean, I get it. I get that Jordan’s writing veers sharply between “a little bit sexist” and “whoa lordy that’s sexist.” I get that there are between two and four books in the middle of it where nothing happens, and that number really only varies by how forgiving you are. I get that Jordan’s allegories are so sheerly clever that sometimes they’re just kind of silly. And did I mention the sexism? Because lordy. But the Wheel of Time has had some truly fantastic moments of fuckyeah: the charge of the heroes in book two, the defense of Emond’s Field in book four, the first attack of the Asha’man in book six, pretty much the whole of book eleven. I can forgive a lot for that.

(And yes, I get that Brandon Sanderson deserves lots of credit for finishing the series off, but I don’t like his other stuff that much.)

2.) Does anybody else ever look at a chain of books by a single author on their shelf and then think “why is that it?” Sometimes it’s self-evident, of course: there aren’t any more Flashman novels because George Macdonald Fraser died, and every time I see my Flashman books I think “can’t wait for the next – oh.” (Granted, every time I see my Flashman books I also think “I really need to get my Flashmans all in the same edition so they look pretty,” but then I realize that that is kind of silly and if I want to give my money away there are poor people in need of soup.)

But Christopher Moore. Why is my Christopher Moore broken up? There are at least three Christopher Moore books I don’t have yet, and I love all his books. Why haven’t I gotten around to reading them? I mean, yes, I always have a pile of books that I’ve bought and yet to read. I’m one of those sorts of people who buy books and then forget to read them: it doesn’t help having the flagship store of an excellent and gigantic used bookstore chain just down the street from me, letting me buy quality books for a few bucks a pop. But this isn’t the “not enough time in your life to read everything that’s worth reading” problem that keeps me from finishing all that Dostoyevsky, or that Complete Robert E. Howard Conan collection, or Everything Is Illuminated¹. We’re talking here about books by an author I like and I know I actively want to keep reading. What the hell is up with that?

See also: Walter Mosley, Michael Chabon, Mil Millington, Guy Gavriel Kay.²³⁴

And then, of course, there’s P.J. O’Rourke, who I stopped reading when he stopped being funny, which was a long time ago. Which is a shame, because P.J.’s early stuff is fantastic.

3.) Does anybody else have a lot of one-offs? Books by authors you really liked and then felt no need to keep reading that person’s stuff? It’s like the literary equivalent of having that one Beta Band single on your iPod. And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, Run by Douglas E. Winter, Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke – these are all great books and I’m glad they’re on my shelf and I won’t be getting rid of them any time soon, but I’m not gonna check out those authors’ other works either, and I can’t think of a good reason why.

4.) Why the hell do I still have a copy of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young?

5.) I’m overdue for a culling, obviously, which can be so depressing sometimes. I mean, surely someone will get more love and inspiration from All I Need To Know About Filmmaking I Learned From The Toxic Avenger by Lloyd Kaufman, and it’s just gathering dust, but I don’t want to get rid of it. Those Mick Foley memoirs? Print The Legend, that fantastic John Ford biography? Argh. I know I will never read these books again, but they need to make room for new books. I mean, A Memory of Light is gonna be like sixty billion pages. I’d need to ditch six copies of Best Seat in the House, Spike Lee’s entertaining-but-uneven basketball memoir, in order to make room so that I can find out what the hell happens to Rand Al’Thor.⁵

I also have trouble culling because one of my favorite types of book is the oddball history – things like Joel Glenn Brunner’s The Emperors of Chocolate or Charlatan by Pope Brock or For All The Tea In China by Sarah Rose. I can never get rid of this sort of book, because I always think “well, there are ideas in here and I am building a weird writer’s reference library and suchlike, it is an asset.” Which means they just accumulate, unceasingly. And I must be fine with this.

1. Which I bought either because I really liked the cover or because I saw maybe twenty minutes of the film adaptation and thought “well, I might read the book based on this.”
2. Kay can also do epic fantasy fuckyeah like nobody’s business, but hasn’t really been interested in doing it for years. Which is a shame, because if you’ve read The Fionovar Tapestry you know Kay can bring the fuckyeah.
3. The CBC should spend a lot of money on a miniseries adaptation of those books.
4. Ha! I just suggested that the CBC spend lots of money on something! I’m hilarious!
5. Well, Perrin and Mat, actually. I don’t really care about Rand. Rand is boring.

With “The Robots of Death”, a classic Fourth Doctor…no, wait. Sorry. Got a bit mixed up there. You start reading the Discworld novels with the understanding that you really do not need to read them in order. It helps you to understand a few details, such as why the Librarian at the greatest institution of magical learning on the Disc is inconveniently stuck in the form of an orangutan, and why the Thieves’ Guild of Ankh-Morpork is a fully-licensed and authorized body of law enforcement, but it’s not actually necessary. Each book is fully stand-alone, they frequently feature different casts, and Pratchett is one of the best expository writers in the business, so you should be pretty good to go no matter what point you pick to jump in.

That said, there are better spots to jump in than the first book. It’s interesting, and you’ll want to come back to it sooner or later to catch up on some of the things he’s helpful enough to establish at the beginning, but it’s also very clearly Pratchett’s juvenalia, and Rincewind (the main character of the first couple of books) is probably his least likeable protagonist. Not that he’s unlikeable, but he’s a cynic and a coward and really only has one bona fide moment of true heroism in the roughly seven books he stars in. So we can skip ahead a bit, past the first five books that Pratchett uses to establish the concept in his own mind and figure out what he wants to do with the fictional universe he’s creating as he goes.

Which means that the first book to start with is ‘Wyrd Sisters’. It’s a sharp, funny, easily accessible book that satirizes Shakespeare (the plot is sort of a bizarre remix/mashup of Macbeth, with the witches as heroes and the king as a villain) while establishing a lot of the core concepts and characters that you’ll see recur over the course of the series. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and the kingdom of Lancre all get an excellent introduction for the casual reader (even though Granny Weatherwax has previously appeared.)

From there, you can comfortably read ‘Pyramids’, ‘Guards! Guards!’ (the novel that introduces the City Watch, probably the best-loved characters by fans)…skip ‘Faust Eric’, which is a pretty direct sequel to one of the first five books, but then you can read the next six in a row (‘Moving Pictures’, ‘Reaper Man’, ‘Witches Abroad’, ‘Small Gods’, ‘Lords and Ladies’, ‘Men At Arms’.)

Now go back and read the first five. By this time you’ll be attached enough to the characters that you’ll feel comfortable reading through the first two (slightly sloggy) novels, and by ‘Equal Rites’ Pratchett’s writing skill has evolved to the point where you’re reading perfectly serviceable fantasy novels. ‘Mort’ is excellent (and has sometimes been my advised starting spot), and ‘Sourcery’, while a little rough in places, does answer a lot of questions you might have had about how magic works on the Disc.

Then go back and read the one you skipped, and pick up again with ‘Soul Music’. Not only will you understand pretty quickly why I suggested going back and reading the early books (‘Soul Music’ and ‘Interesting Times’ are fairly direct sequels to the earliest books) but you’ll also be struck by how much Pratchett has evolved as a writer in those first eleven years. He went from being a good writer to being a truly great writer, and as you continue onwards, you’ll be impressed even more. All of them are worth reading, and by the end, you’ll be just as much of a fan as I am.

And at some point, you’ll want to read them all over again from the beginning…

And perhaps that’s why it has been such a bittersweet experience, reading his latest work. Anyone who cares even a little about Pratchett is already aware of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and it’s hard not to read his latest books (one in the ‘Young Adult’ line of Discworld novels, one in the main line, although honestly Pratchett never writes down to kids and never writes too inaccessibly for adults, meaning that the distinction seems mainly to be where they’re filed in the bookstore) without feeling like Pratchett is all too aware of it as well. Not that it’s affected his writing; I heard one or two people tell me that they felt like ‘Unseen Academicals’ was a little less sharp than his other books, but I didn’t feel that at all when I read it. Lord knows that if the man is feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s in his writing, there are a lot of writers out there (myself included) who should feel tremendously humbled that he still writes circles around us.

But it is clear that Pratchett knows that there won’t be that many Discworld novels. Having written for decades in an open-ended universe of his own creation with no particular destination in mind, it finally feels as if Pratchett is saying, “Time to wrap things up, I think.” That’s not to say he’s planning a ‘last’ Discworld novel; it’s more that he’s keenly aware that each Discworld novel now could be the last, and he’s writing them as though he won’t get to say anything more on the topic.

And so, in ‘Unseen Academicals’, we get something of a summation of the theme he’s been working on for quite some time; overtly, since ‘The Truth’, but on many levels he’s been heading there ever since ‘The Colour of Magic’. This is about the transformation of Ankh-Morpork (and by extension the entire Disc) from a medieval “fantasy kingdom” straight out of the cod-Tolkien Dark Ages that every third goddamned fantasy universe seems to exist in, through to a modern city with rules and laws and what we laughingly refer to as “civilization”. (“Because Ankh-Morpork cares deeply about the right of all oppressed peoples to govern themselves! Oh, it must be the way I tell them.”) Pratchett stopped hitting the “it was all evil magic and the hero has stopped it and things are back to normal” reset button a long time ago, and in ‘Unseen Academicals’, we finally get the ultimate logical extension of his grand theme; who’s to say that even a creature created by dark magic specifically to be evil can’t be good if given the chance? Pratchett finally makes the break with Tolkien clear and clean. Our problems will not be solved with the return of the king, the orcs are not genetically imprinted with the sins of their ancestors, and wizards don’t always know better than everyone else. Your future is what you make it. So make it something worth being proud of when it’s your past.

Over in ‘I Shall Wear Midnight’, meanwhile, he’s summing up the journey of Tiffany Aching from girl to woman and from apprentice to witch. Tiffany long ago took over the role of “principal witch” in the Discworld books, primarily because Granny Weatherwax had become so absurdly powerful and dangerous that she practically had to fade into the background and become a wise old mentor just to keep the book going beyond thirty pages. (Anyone planning to burn Granny Weatherwax as a witch would wind up having the first mob in history that went home after a sharp scolding.) So here we get a novel that could stand quite serviceably as the culmination of that journey, even if we wind up hearing more about her as an adult, and we also get old-home guest appearances from just about every witch to appear in the books before (including one I was very surprised by. Although I admit to wishing Magrat had gotten more to do.)

The books are excellent as always, and of course I recommend them; anyone who’s not reading Terry Pratchett should be, because otherwise you’re missing out on some excellent writing. But these are a little bid sad, I think, because they feel like they could be the last.

Captain America: An obvious choice for an Avenger, but a less obvious decision over which house he winds up in. On the one hand, you can’t question the courage of the star-spangled Avenger; this is a guy who wanted to join World War II before it even started, because despite the fact that he weighed ninety pounds soaking wet, he wanted to go sock Hitler on the jaw. And that’s before you even get into the “standing toe-to-toe with Thanos despite Thanos having the Infinity Gauntlet and Cap having his fighting spirit” thing. But courage, while it is an important trait of Cap, is not his defining trait.

The recent Cap movie actually showed it best, in the scenes between Steve Rogers and Professor Erskine (some of the best scenes in a great movie.) Cap doesn’t join up because he wants to go out and prove his courage fighting Nazis, he joins up because he believes strongly that he should stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves and it never even occurs to him that he’s one of them. He joins out of a sense of duty to protect others, and if that’s not Hufflepuff, I don’t know what is.

Iron Man: Lately, of course, it seems like Tony is a prime candidate for Slytherin; somewhere around the time he conquered his alcoholism, desperate writers have settled on “asshole control freak tries to use technology to control his surroundings and finds out the hard way just how badly that turns out” as his default story arc. (That is, when he’s not being mind controlled to kill lots of people. You begin to understand why they rebooted him three times.) But underlying the whole desire to control is a naive, almost pathetic belief that he can solve all his problems just by inventing cool enough stuff that it will fix everyone’s problems in the whole world. Tony Stark thinks that if he can create a better process, a better system, then he can create a better humanity. This belief that intelligence, properly applied, can solve any problem makes him a perfect Ravenclaw!

Thor: Thor routinely goes out and fights giants. Because he can. You’d just have to wave the Sorting Hat in his general direction to hear “GRYFFINDOR!” shouted out in the Great Hall.

Hawkeye: He’s one of my all-time favorite characters and a staple Avenger (who has, in my personal opinion, been mishandled worse under the Quesada/Bendis era of the series worse than any other character in the entire franchise, and that includes the decision to make Power Man and Iron Fist Avengers.) He’s also a joyously uncomplicated character, a brash manchild who found purpose and meaning to his life by joining the Avengers and adopting their ideals as his own. Arguably, Hawkeye’s turn under the Sorting Hat would involve a long, telepathic argument over whether or not they should just make a fifth house, because it’s downright insulting to stick Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in a bunch of lesser outfits. But eventually, the Sorting Hat would decide that a guy who deliberately forgoes Hank Pym’s growth serum to  battle mad gods and alien armadas armed with a bow and arrows belongs in Gryffindor.

Hank Pym: Okay, maybe Hank Pym was handled worse by Bendis than any other character…let’s call it a toss-up, okay? (Yes, I have issues with Bendis’ handling of the classic Avengers characters. Specifically, I have several hundred issues, and all of them establish clear character beats that Bendis ignores because paying attention to established characterization takes up time he could be using to plot his latest three-issue long halting conversation.) The point is, Hank Pym’s defining character trait isn’t anger or emotional instability. He had a major nervous breakdown at one point that caused him to lash out against his friends and loved ones, but what caused that breakdown was the stress of trying to be a superhero even though he was never really cut out for it. He wanted to be a scientist, helping people through his inventions instead of hitting people, but duty to the people he cared about kept calling him back to it. It’s that sense of dedication to the Avengers that makes the Sorting Hat choose Hufflepuff over Ravenclaw, even though it might take a while to choose.

Wasp: Let’s see. Janet became a superhero because her father died and her new boyfriend suggested she help him avenge that death (two emotional connections early on.) She spent her free time volunteering at a local hospital reading to sick children (duty to the helpless.) She met a bunch of superheroes and immediately suggested they all bond together into a common group (more dedication to community and family.) She eventually wound up becoming the chairwoman of the Avengers–not because she was ambitious, but because a chairwoman was needed and it was time for her to step up and help the team. She eventually sacrificed herself…um, sort of, because Thor did something, or…*sigh* Bendis… *sigh* The point is, when you look at the Wasp’s career, she’s always been about dedication to her large, self-made, extended family. She might never have become a hero if she’d been left to her own devices, but she cares about heroes enough to want to help them out. She’s a Hufflepuff if there ever was one.

Bonus non-Avenger characters! While I will maintain, to my dying day, that the inclusion of Spider-Man and Wolverine into the ranks of the Avengers was a colossal mistake that shows that Bendis not only never understood any of the characters he was writing, he actually never understood the core concept of the book he took over and should not have been allowed near the series with a ten-foot pole, I also know that people probably want to know where they wound up. So for the record, Spidey‘s a classic Hufflepuff (“with great power must come great responsibility”), while Wolverine would be a Gryffindor until he got expelled for sneaking non-butter-beer into the dorms and wound up getting kept by Hagrid as a pet.

Which still leaves a lot of Avengers. Let’s face it, unlike the JLA, the Avengers has a constantly fluctuating line-up; feel free to add your favorite Avengers in the comments!

Superman, like Harry himself, would be a good choice for more than one house. His steely-hard integrity and devotion to friends like Jimmy and Lois (when he’s not in the Silver Age and “teaching them a lesson” about one thing or another by subjecting them to absurd robot-double based humiliations) could land him in Hufflepuff, while his intellect would also make him a good fit in Ravenclaw. (Although that’s an element of the character that’s been played down post-Byrne reboot…it used to be that Superman used the Fortress of Solitude to do his own elaborate experiments too dangerous or complex to be carried out in labs on inhabited continents, but these days he mostly subcontracts out the “being smart” to STARLabs.) But ultimately, Superman is someone who isn’t afraid of anything. It’s what makes him such an inspirational superhero; he’s what we could be if we were freed of our insecurities and vulnerabilities. And it’s what would make him an excellent Gryffindor!

Batman, of course, has already been covered with devastating accuracy by Chris Sims. I’d recap his logic here, but that’s what links are all about; suffice to say that he’s dead right, and Batman would be in Ravenclaw. (Where he would be joined by Batgirl, Oracle and at least one or two Robins, if the crossover was big enough.)

Wonder Woman is interesting, because while she’s every bit as brave and heroic as Superman, what defines them as different is Wonder Woman’s boundless compassion. She’s always been more interested in reforming villains and showing them a better way to live (anyone remember the Golden Age Paula von Gunther?) It’d be pretty easy to see her and Helga Hufflepuff commiserating on the plight of those poor students scorned by the other three houses and making a commitment to ensure than nobody goes through Hogwarts alone. She understands that “loyalty” and “dedication” are more than just being a tireless worker or a good friend, but being someone anyone can rely on. Which is what makes her the best Hufflepuff!

Green Lantern has, of course, already been through a glorified version of the Sorting when he became Green Lantern. Sure, it was funny-colored aliens instead of battered old hats, but who knows what the Sorting Hat is actually made out of? It looks kinda leathery; maybe somewhere in the mists of time the four founders of Hogwarts skinned themselves a Guardian and made it into a hat, and the tradition just evolved from there. In any event, “fearless” as a requirement for Green Lantern-hood makes it pretty obvious that whether Hal, Kyle, John or Guy, they’d all be Gryffindor!

The Flash…Barry’s the easiest to categorize, but all of the Flashes over the years share a certain reliability and dependability to them. The different Flashes, no matter which one you’re talking about, never had any particular trauma in their past that made them “driven to dispense justice” (except in the TV show, of course…) They just got powers, looked at the world around them, and said, “Hey, I should help out with this.” For Barry, it was an extension of his job, and for Wally, it was an extension of his friendship with Barry. Jay shares the same matter-of-fact approach to heroism, the kind of steady and old-fashioned nature that would make them excellent Hufflepuffs!

Martian Manhunter is another very easy one; he’s classically been seen as the team’s tactician ever since the characters stopped being merely a collection of superheroes that followed a writing formula and started being an actual team that people wrote stories about. (Which was sometime in the 1970s, probably..) We see it clearest in Morrison’s JLA, but it’s usually Martian Manhunter who is coming up with the plan and telling everyone else (with his mind) how to get it done. As such, he’d be right at home with Batman in Ravenclaw! (Anyone who does not want to see a storyline where Batman and Martian Manhunter forge a group of teenage witches and wizards into a merciless, steel-hard magical justice dispensing machine has no poetry in their soul, dammit.)

Aquaman is unique among all the Justice League in that he’s actually more important in his “civilian” identity than in his superheroic one. As King of Atlantis, he is responsible for guiding the destiny of a nation and commanding its people…and while he’s at times a reluctant ruler, and he’s certainly no despot, he is nonetheless accustomed to being the leader of a nation. He has to set an agenda for a whole country, he has at times had to fight challengers to the throne, and even when dealing with his own teammates, you can tell that he expects them to follow his direction…and while you couldn’t say that it’s the only aspect of his character, any more than you could claim that Batman isn’t brave or Wonder Woman isn’t smart, Aquaman is a rare example of a good character whose strongest aspect is ambition. As such, he would be a fine example of something sadly lacking in Rowling’s actual novels…a good Slytherin!

There’s the basic seven; if you have thoughts on other DC characters and their treatment by the Sorting Hat, feel free to leave them in the comments!*

*Yes, it is distinctly possible that I’ve gone completely insane. As it’s the kind of insanity that leads to Batman giving ninja-training to a horde of telepathically-linked Ravenclaws, I make no apologies.

Well, technically I suppose this is also an open letter to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the producers of Game of Thrones. But if I said this was an open letter to them, everybody would just say “huh?” So it’s an open letter to George R. R. Martin instead. After all, he is The Man in this regard, I should think.

So: Game of Thrones. It’s wildly successful, a show that’s both extremely popular and critically acclaimed. HBO greenlit the second season while the first was just really starting to get going, and that’s good. I’ve got high hopes for seeing what you guys do with the big battle in A Clash of Kings, and I’m pleased to see who you’ve cast in the various major players showing up in book two. Really, I have no complaints with the show so far.

But right now, I’m thinking about your third season, when you’re more or less done with A Clash of Kings and have to move on to A Storm of Swords. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, come on. We’re working on season two right now. We don’t even know if there’s going to be a season three. Look what happened to Rome.” And yes, this is true. But I feel that someone has to bring up something about book three well in advance. Just so you can keep it in mind if and when it comes time to start working on season three, you see. It makes sense to start laying the groundwork now.

So. The show. It’s a great show. But, if there is one criticism you can make (other than the fact that Roz, while hot, is really kinda pointless other than being hot), it’s the fact that it’s… well…

…It’s a very white show, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong: I know that there are conventions and expectations of the genre. I know that people, when you tell them this is a show about knights and castles and swords, think that all of that equals white people. I don’t think the fact that your cast is almost entirely white is some kind of sin at all: far from it. Westeros is one culture within the world you’ve created, and it is a culture that is mostly white people. And that’s fine. It’s maybe a little irksome that the one distinctly non-white culture you’ve introduced to us so far is the Dothraki, and the problem of television needing visual shortcuts means you had to cut down a lot of the complexities in Dothraki culture when adapting from book to screen, but it’s understandable. The Dothraki are mostly off to one side now anyway. A Game of Thrones being a white-ass show is perfectly understandable in this context.

But in A Storm of Swords, you introduce Dorne to the world stage. Allow me to quote:

The salty Dornishmen were lithe and dark, with smooth olive skin and long black hair streaming in the wind. The sandy Dornishmen were even darker, their faces burned brown by the hot Dornish sun. They wound long scarfs around their helms to ward off sunstroke. The stony Dornishmen were biggest and fairest, sons of the Andals and the First Men, brown haired or blond, with faces that freckled or burned in the sun instead of browning.

If you took out the names and replaced them appropriately, this would describe the population of Iran well enough. Or most Arabic countries, for that matter, or northern African, or… well, you get the point. I’m sure I didn’t need to make it, G.R.R.M. After all, you wrote it. The point being: the Dornishmen are brown people. You describe Oberyn Martell as “saturnine, with thin arched brows above large eyes as black and shiny as pools of coal oil,” and later explicitly mention that his skin is dark. So that’s the point of this letter: when you’re casting season three, bear in mind that Dornishmen are, for the most part, brown folks. Cast accordingly.

And you might say “well, why do you need to tell me that? After all, I wrote the damn books. I know what Oberyn Martell looks like.” And that’s fair. But Hollywood has a track record in these sorts of affairs, and the track record is not good. Let us remember the debacle that was the live-action adaptation of Avatar, where white kids were hired to play characters that were distinctly not-at-all-white? (Worse, they were white kids of middling to little talent, which was just insulting to anybody who gives a damn about this sort of thing.) It’s common knowledge that nonwhite people other than Will Smith need not apply to be heroic protagonists in Hollywood these days.

And really, asking to let Dorne be Dorne isn’t pushing too hard against those preconceptions. The series is not called A Song of Ice and Dorne. House Martell may be pretty awesome, but they’re minor players in the story and we all know that. I’m just saying that you wisely decided that in your books, some of the noble houses of Westeros would be non-white. It would be a valuable thing, then, to extend that to the HBO series, and let people see that knights can be brown too.

Also, most importantly, it would let this dude be the Red Viper:

Right? Right? Of course I’m right.

The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald by Clifford D. Hicks. The Alvin Fernald books have aged slightly (written in the 60s and set contemporaneously), but pair off as a nice comparison with the Great Brain books because both series are about smarter-than-average kids (Alvin frequently refers to his “Magnificent Brain”) who have adventures as a result of their smarts. Alvin is a more conventionally likeable hero than the Great Brain; most of his books feature Alvin getting into a situation by dint of his smarts – becoming mayor for a day, starting up his own TV newscast, and so forth – and then getting into an adventure as a result of that. The Wacky World veers away from that model by being a collection of shorter stories, mostly inspired pranks dreamed up by Alvin, some of which are quite sophisticated (an early instance of identity creation, for example, which seems eerily prescient and relevant now) and serves as a decent entry point for the series as a whole.

The Seventh Princess by Nick Sullivan. A brilliant little pageturner wherein a young girl finds herself transported from her schoolbus to a magical kingdom where she is informed she is now the princess of the kingdom. Except she’s the seventh princess – and nobody seems to want to tell her what happened to the first six. A self-driven female protagonist, some really great writing and a clever plot make this a must-read for any kid so far as I’m concerned. I’ve been told once or twice that this was the first book in a trilogy, but can find no trace of the other two even existing.

Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Snyder (still writing in her eighties) is nowadays best known for The Egypt Game and The Witches of Worm, both of which won her Newbery Awards, but these were always my favorites of her books: her biggest venture into science fiction, a trilogy about a future where humans escaping a war-torn Earth settled a new, low-gravity world with gigantic, enormous trees – and then couldn’t agree on how to proceed. The fallout from that decision seeds the entire story, which is uniquely nonviolent in its handling of conflict. At some point, some enterprising producer (probably Pixar) is going to realize that these three books are a megablockbuster children’s movie waiting to happen, so I advise everyone to get in on the ground floor and read them before that happens so you can get the literary experience first.

The Westing Game and The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin. Speaking of film, The Westing Game has been adapted into a film – and disappointed, which is a shame because a good adaptation of it would be simply cracking. Both of these books are mysteries as well, but epic mysteries. Westing features a large cast, most of whom are the heirs of a murdered tycoon, trying to solve the mystery of who murdered him in order to claim his estate. Leon (Noel) is a quest-mystery as the heroine searches for her missing husband – whom she has never met – over the course of many years. Both novels play expertly with language and words, both to stimulate a young mind and to teach it about language. and both are entertaining; Leon (Noel) is a comedic farce and Westing a more serious thriller, but neither one anything less than engaging at every moment.¹

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. The original cover of the book does it a terrible injustice, making it look like some dreadfully boring bog-standard kidslit. This is not that book; this is a deeply weird and highly dystopic novel about a literal war between teachers and kids, with actual battles and everything. An Orwellian vibe permeates the whole novel, and Kiesel ramps the absurdity up to twelve (eleven is for pussies) with each new chapter, as a gorilla-like sixth-grade girl jousts against the ultimate evil gym teacher in the climax of the book. And then Kiesel gets truly brave and has the kids lose. A sequel, Skinny Malinky and the War for Kidness, eventually got written in order to provide the requisite happy ending, and it’s good too, but I almost prefer the tiger-ending of the first book, as the hero learns what’s happened to his closest friends. Dark, dark, dark. And wonderful.

I Want To Go Home! and No Coins, Please by Gordon Korman. Both of these were written before Korman was out of high school, which should make you deeply jealous of Korman’s abilities. Korman’s early kidslit tends to be wildly farcical, but these two of his books are his most engaging because the farce emerges in each case from a wildly competent non-POV character, which for me makes the point that if Batman were to really exist he would bring us high comedy all the time. In I Want To Go Home!, the Batman kid is so good at absolutely everything camp-related that the only thing at camp that gives him any pleasure is escaping it repeatedly; in No Coins, Please the Batman kid is a wildly brilliant entrepreneur with a talent for bending laws, so that he ends a junior-kids auto-tour about a million dollars ahead of where he started. Korman has a gift for writing slapstick and making it resonate on the page, and for making ludicrous situations seem plausible; these are valuable talents given his plots.

Bone by Jeff Smith. Christ, how many times do I have to tell you people to read Bone before you do it already?

1. Raskin also had a fondness for footnotes that was positively Pratchettian, and my love of footnotes in fiction stems from her rather than Sir Terry.

The sad part, I think, is the way the good idea at the core of the novel is utterly wasted. There is a good novel to be written with the idea of lycanthropy as a sexually-transmitted disease, and its spread through a small California town. The subtext of the hypocrisy and deceit involved in people’s sex lives, combined with the potent symbolism of the werewolf as the unrestrained id, has the potential to make for a good novel in the hands of a good author. But Garton can’t think of anything, anything at all interesting to do with the idea. His werewolves are mindless raping/killing machines, lumbering through the endlessly repetitive novel with as much interest as a boulder rolling down a hill. Anything that gets in their way is in trouble, characters either escape them or don’t, but they have no personality to speak of.

They share this trait, unfortunately, with the human characters in the novel, who seem to have one of three roles: 1) Get eaten, 2) become a werewolf, or 3) some combination of 1 & 2. The author is clearly trying to do a novel along the lines of “Salem’s Lot with werewolves” (and sadly, I suspect that was exactly what he sold to the publisher as his outline) but reading Ravenous illustrates why Stephen King is a multi-millionaire best-selling critically-acclaimed author, while Ray Garton will be forever trapped in mid-list horror potboiler hell: This shit be hard. Creating an interesting small town, investing its population with life and personality and conveying that to the reader, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of insight into human nature, and a genuine sympathy for the characters you’re writing about, even the unpleasant and unlikeable ones. As opposed to a mindset of, “‘Werewolves come into town and rape and kill everybody’ is about 64,991 words too short for a paperback novel. I need to pad this out a little.”

That’s really the worst thing about Garton’s characterization. As you might have noticed from my frequent use of the word “rape” in this review, there’s plenty of rape involved in the novel. I’d be tempted to call it misogynist, but I really believe that it’s more an example of the rote, stimulus/response approach to characterization in the book. Garton doesn’t have the skill, or more relevantly the energy to invest his werewolf chow with real personalities. So he relies on the short-hand manipulation of brutality; the character with an abusive husband has to be sympathetic, because she gets beat up. The husband, by contrast, has to be unsympathetic, because he’s a rapist. As far as Garton seems to be concerned, the question is settled; why bother giving them personalities after that? The world of Ravenous is divided up into victims and monsters, and that’s about as much effort as the author puts into it.

The novel does develop a bit of momentum around the middle, as the author finishes with the dull “slice of life” section and you begin to suspect that there might be a plot waiting in the wings, preparing to make its appearance, but ultimately this is a novel in which the red herring is the idea that something might happen other than the obvious. As you’re reading it, various ideas might occur to you for the direction the plot might take, but I guarantee you, you’re putting too much effort into it. Just think of the most predictable conclusion to a novel that’s nothing more than an exercise in pointless sadism, and you’ll have it right there.

Um, in case I’m not clear here, I’m not recommending the book.