Mitchell Hundred: The above article was written a while ago about fantasy novels, but a similar trend could also be identified in many forms of contemporary art (increasing gritty realism, morally ambiguous narrative, graphic description of unpleasant events, etc.). What do you make of the accusation made in the above article (that these pieces demean the genre and art as a whole)?

It’s wank, pure and simple. (I know, wank at Big Hollywood? Goodness gracious me!) Just for the sake of argument, let’s rattle off the bestselling fantasy authors of the past decade: Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Christopher Paolini, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin… are we seeing a trend here? The overwhelming trend in fantasy isn’t what the writer describes; it’s a push towards moral clarity to appeal to a young-adult audience. (And, in the case of Jordan, braid-tugging.) Even Martin, who’s probably the closest to what the author complains about, has very strongly moral characters in his books: Jon Snow, most of the Starks, many of the Night’s Watch, Davos, Daenerys… you can even make a case for Jaime Lannister.

What the author is complaining about is that the sort of sword-and-sorcery fantasy he likes (which he tokens to become all fantasy writing period) is getting gritty and unpleasant now, to which I respond “where were you when Stephen R. Donaldson started writing books in the late Seventies?” Hell, has he read any old Conan stories? Conan is not a nice person!

Nicodemus: Have you ever read the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher?

No. It’s one of my “get around to it” things. That list just keeps getting longer.

FistFullofFists: On a scale of sad to depressed, how sad are you to see stargate universe canceled?

Not at all. I mean, I’m sorry people who liked Stargate: Whatever lost out on a show, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like The Bachelor where the existence of the show is actively offensive. But I watched the movie and then I watched a few episodes of the first season of SG-1 and then I said, “well, that’s enough for me.”

Skemono: I think everyone would benefit from an essay on why Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.

Some people think Hawkman sucks because all he does is fly. This is erroneous. There are plenty of superheroes who “just fly,” and many of them are quite nifty, because flying is honestly pretty cool all by itself, and because it’s a natural progression for flying heroes who just fly to be more skillful fliers (Angel of the X-Men, for example, or Dawnstar in the LSH – yes, I know she has tracking powers too, but big deal) which gives them an additional niche. Hawkman, however, does not do this. What Hawkman does instead is be a dickhead: he’s the Token Conservative to Green Arrow’s Token Liberal (and Green Arrow is just as annoying as fucking Hawkman is) and it’s become his character thing to be a pompous, annoying douche.

On top of that, there are the melee weapons. In a setting where people can blow you up with eye lasers, melee weapons are stupid. More importantly, though, is that because they are stupid, writers have come up with justifications as to why they are not stupid which make them even stupider. I believe this reached its apex in Cry for Justice, wherein it was explained that Hawkman was “unpredictable” and a “berserker” and therefore Prometheus was worried about him for some reason, as if for some reason Prometheus could not just, like, shoot him.

And then there’s his origin story. Hawkman’s origin story has been so mangled that it is beyond belief, mostly because people wanted to “reconcile” Egyptian Hawkman and Space Hawkman into one character, which is stupid because it’s not like there’s some special ability you need to let you put on a flying belt and wings.

So basically everything about Hawkman sucks.

drasnianfrank: What are the best Dr. Strange issues to read (or issues that have Dr. Strange in them)?

Anything from the original Lee/Ditko run is good, but my soft spot is Roy Thomas’s run on the line; just gorgeous cosmic stuff, as you would expect from Thomas. “The Montesi Formula” story is truly excellent writing with mediocre art (and available in trade). Warren Ellis’ brief run on the character towards the end of Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme is well worth reading, as is Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Oath.

Just go with the Essentials, really: the B&W art actually, I think, improves the comics, since the lack of “hey look we’re otherworldly” colouring makes the book far more readable.

scarecrowprophet: I realised the original text for the first 30 ISWTLegion posts isn’t up, just the pictures and later commentary. Could you post the original text?

The original text largely isn’t worth reproducing. Remember, ISWTL started out as a series of joke posts; only towards the end did I start doing what I did with them later, exploring plot hooks and the like.

Cookie McCool: But then, I had a huge crush on Aquaman back then, too, so what the fuck did I know?

Hey, Aquaman is pretty cool when he’s done right. Which isn’t often (WHERE IS HIS BEARD, DAMMIT? HE LOOKS TEN THOUSAND TIMES MORE AWESOME WITH A BEARD), but hey.

JL: What’s the status of that Novella? I really liked what I read and the hook was golden.

Novel, not novella; it’s on hold while I try to get a lot of other things done. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of the year, but then again I said that last year. (I have a lot of sympathy for George R.R. Martin.)

Once upon a time, there was a book series called “Doctor Who”. (You might have heard me mention it from time to time.) It was based on the then-defunct TV series, and took the show in some fairly strange new directions. Specifically, and I know this is going to sound a little bit crazy, it featured the Eighth Doctor finding out that at some point in his own personal future, Gallifrey was going to wind up going to war with a mysterious unnamed Enemy…a war that future Gallifrey was losing. Different Time Lord factions reacted to this in different ways; the Celestis, for example, planned to flee space-time altogether and exist as beings of pure intellect outside the universe as we know it (something that should sound more than a little familiar to viewers of “The End of Time”) while Faction Paradox…

Faction Paradox was a strange creation. Invented by Lawrence Miles, they were a group of counter-culture Time Lords who revered the two things that immortal guardians of space and time would naturally fear: Death and paradox. They dressed up in skull masks, practiced a peculiar form of voodoo (okay, three things–the technophiliac Time Lords were freaked out by the seeming magic of the Faction) and reveled in creating “safe” temporal disruptions. They weren’t exactly enemies, but they didn’t have much love for the Time Lords, either.

Fast forward a few years, and the TV series comes back. The book line pretty much dies out, becoming a vague, inoffensive adjunct to the show, but due to the vagaries of British copyright law, Lawrence Miles remains full owner of the Faction Paradox concept. He launches a spin-off line of books, set in the Doctor Who universe with the serial numbers filed off (the Time Lords become the “Homeworld”, but the Enemy stays the Enemy because Miles insists he never intended them to be the Daleks.) Surprisingly, these books are quite good. This is the story of the best of them.

“Warlords of Utopia”, by Lance Parkin, is perhaps the highest of all “high concept” science fiction stories; it starts in an alternate reality where Rome never fell, but in this novel, the inhabitants (with the help of Faction Paradox) discover another reality where Rome never fell. Then another, then another, until they have a vast cross-time Roman Empire ruled by a Council of Emperors.

Then they discover all the universes where the Nazis won World War II…

The concept, and the ensuing war, is one of the cleverest ideas I’ve seen explored in science-fiction in a long time. (Full disclosure: I’ve been on a few mailing lists with Lance Parkin over the years, and am on a first-name basis with him, even if we’re never going to see eye to eye on Buffy or the Star Wars prequels.) The book genuinely feels like an idea that someone needed to write a book about, and Lance was just the person to write it. I recommend it to anyone who’s seen the two relevant tropes more time than they can count.

I’ve been reading some zombie novels lately; among others, I’ve read ‘Dead City’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘Day By Day Armageddon’…and I have to say, at the risk of offending authors who have some online presence (and plenty of online fans), most of them are really not that good. The current crop of zombie books tend to regurgitate Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, with a dash of “28 Days Later” for that bioweapon flavor and a generous helping of Mary-Sue-ism to boot. (One exception is David Wellington’s “Monster Island” and its sequels, which do some eye-poppingly clever things with the zombie apocalypse concept.)

And yet, the whole reason I picked them up is that I love zombie movies…and I gotta say, I love the cheesy ones just as much as the brilliant ones. “Nightmare City”, “Hell of the Living Dead”, “The Dead Next Door”, “Feeding the Masses” (which actually had a brilliant script, let down by sub-pornographic actors)…bad or good, I cheerfully watch them from beginning to end. Sometimes, the worse they are the better they are. “Diary of the Dead” is never going to match up to Romero’s earlier masterpieces, but I guarantee you, you will never find a movie with a more bad-ass Amish farmer or drama teacher.

So what’s the difference? Why do I love a bad zombie movie, but grow furious at the lack of ambition and drive behind the majority of most zombie novels? The answer, and I think a lot of readers will find it obvious, is the level of investment needed to finish a movie versus a book. A ninety minute movie lasts ninety minutes, and then it’s over. Whether that ninety minutes is filled with “Shaun of the Dead”, or “Shadow: Dead Riot”, they’re both done when the credits roll.

But a good 300-page book and a bad 300-page book…the former flies by almost on its own, as your mind pictures the story so vividly that you don’t even notice turning the pages. Whereas the latter crawls past at a snail’s pace, as your brain rebels at the thought of reading even one more sentence. You find yourself easily distracted, making excuses to put the book down…and yet, when you work up the nerve to get back to it, the book is right there waiting for you exactly where you left off. It’s like a movie that pauses itself whenever it thinks you’ve stopped paying attention.

And a horror movie can descend to the level of “so bad it’s good.” Inept comedy is merely excruciatingly dull, while inept horror can sometimes become brilliant comedy (which is why the movie “The Mad”, with Billy Zane, failed so badly. But I digress.) But the failings of prose are different than the failings of film, and what can inspire you to watch a bad movie again and again merely inspires you to throw a book at the wall so hard it makes a dent.

It’s a curious difference, the way that engaging with a work of bad art can produce such different effects in different media. The bad zombie movie only attains its true potential as entertainment when the audience engages with it, refusing to passively accept it and instead dealing with it on their own terms. But with bad zombie books, the more you engage with it, the worse it becomes. The only way to succeed is not to get involved at all. (Especially ‘City of the Dead’. Sorry, Brian Keene, but it was a mistake to try to get a sequel out of ‘The Rising’.)

A good outing this time around from Pratchett, and although the Tiffany Aching novels are marketed as “young adult” fiction, frankly you could fool me: this one has quite a bit of brutal violence in it, albeit almost all of it offscreen. (Then again Nation had as a set piece the protagonist having to bury his entire village and then nearly committing suicide, so needless to say Pratchett’s idea of what constitutes “young adult” differs markedly from, for example, The Baby-Sitters Club.)

The question of “so what is this Discworld book about” is always raised when a new one comes out. Generally the Tiffany Aching stories don’t aim for larger motifs; Unseen Academicals is about sport and its place in society, for example, and Making Money is about the necessity of (responsible) modern finance, but The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith, while certainly not simple stories, are still more or less straight-up non-ironic fantasy adventures that just happen to be set in the Discworld.

I Shall Wear Midnight breaks from that mold because Pratchett for the first time is using Tiffany to talk about something wider. It’s still a bit vague – Pratchett still wants Tiffany to be his “just a story” character, obviously – but there are enough allusions to The Crucible to let you know that this is, first and foremost, a story about justice. The villain of the story, while certainly evil, is too impersonal to ever really be striking; by the end he’s just a bog-standard evil spirit. All of the best oh-my bits happen in the middle and are only obliquely about the villain.

That having been said – an enjoyable read and as always chock-full of brilliant snatches of writing. But definitely a bit uneven, as a story.

We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.

Nobody has arguments like Doctor Who fans have arguments. There, I’ve said it and I’m not going to take it back. Sure, “Trek” fans have their “Kirk vs. Picard” debates. Yes, “Buffy” fans constantly argue about whether Angel or Spike is Buffy’s One True Love. (Riley never gets a fair shake in those debates.) And sure, “Battlestar Galactica” fans constantly argue about whether the ending of their series was incoherent gibberish, or whether the entire series was just as awful. (I assume.) But Doctor Who fans? We have arguments older than a good percentage of the audience. We have arguments that actually get summed up in books. “Which Doctor is better, Four or Ten?” That barely even scratches the surface. Here’s a quick guide to the big Doctor Who arguments, the evidence for and against each side, and the episodes you can watch to start forming your own irrational opinions.

1) UNIT Dating. When Jon Pertwee took over as the Doctor from Patrick Troughton, it was accompanied by a radical shift in the series’ format. Instead of traveling to alien worlds with his companions to fight monsters, the Doctor was exiled to Earth sans TARDIS, and fought monsters right there in Britain alongside UNIT (a United Nations division tasked with investigating the strange and unusual.)

At the time, the publicity materials announced that this was to be the England of the near-future, and the technology is certainly more advanced than the era in which it was made. (Britain has a fully-fledged space program in “The Ambassadors of Death”, there’s a female Prime Minister in “Terror of the Zygons”, and similar bits of anachronistic tech and unusual fashion.) But clearly, making the series “futuristic” was not in the front of the mind of the production team, and they missed a lot of things that clearly dated the series to the era it was filmed in. (You can see pre-decimal currency signs in shops, they mention Mao Zedong in the present tense, and most of the fashions and all of the haircuts scream “70s”.) By the time the series revisited the era, in the mid-80s, they had totally forgotten about the “future” aspect and set a date for the Brigadier’s retirement in 1977. (Meaning all UNIT stories had to take place before then.) This clearly conflicts with companion Sarah Jane’s comment in “Pyramids of Mars” that she’s from 1980. Only one of these can be right. Pick a side and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, and you’re set!

2) Are the Spin-offs Canon? At the time it came out, the book “No Future” seemed to settle the “UNIT Dating” issue by showing the events that led to the Brigadier’s retirement and setting them in 1976. When the book was published, moreover, the TV series was on an indefinite hiatus and the books were the officially licensed continuation of the show. But then, in 1996, FOX came out with a TV movie that picked up the story with the Seventh Doctor’s regeneration. The books gamely rallied, filling the gap between the novels and the TV movie and continuing on with the new adventures of the Eighth Doctor, but then…

In 1999, Big Finish Productions obtained the rights to do audio plays for Doctor Who. They set up their own competing Eighth Doctor series that became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the books, and canon wars started over which was the “true” timeline. Then, to complicate things further, the TV series came back as well. The TV show has adapted some of the book and audio stories, seemingly rendering them “non-canonical”, but has explicitly contradicted very little of the information in either (about the same amount as it has of the old TV show. Doctor Who creative teams don’t tend to have the same priorities as the fans.) So at the moment, the books and audios are in limbo. There have been clever attempts to work around this (involving the Land of Fiction, or alternate realities) but none of them have been satisfying.

3) Is the Eighth Doctor Half-Human? (Much thanks to my girlfriend for reminding me about this one.) When the TV movie came out in 1996, it was…not entirely well-received, to put it mildly. There were a lot of people who tried to deny that it had ever happened at all, even as he went on to star in seventy-nine novels and sixty or so audio plays. They finally acknowledged the canonicity of the TV movie when the new series showed him in flashback as one of the “official” Doctors, but they continue to insist that the TV movie can’t be an accurate representation of the events of his regeneration. Why? Because the Eighth Doctor, in a moment of either unprecedented honesty or mad whimsy, mentions to a scientist that he’s half-human. (On his mother’s side.)

This is not something Doctor Who fans like. It contradicts a lot of the canon established in the books (but see above.) It establishes the Doctor as part of a biological family, which means that his parents–and quite possibly the Doctor himself–might have squishy bits that they enjoy using (but see below.) And it’s a staggeringly stupid sci-fi cliche which offers no storytelling possibilities at all. Everyone seemed to have agreed not to mention it…until Russell T Davies’ grand finale to his era as Doctor Who showrunner, where he introduced a mysterious Woman In White, who had an unspoken but deep connection to the Doctor and who he recognized as a Time Lord. And she also had a mysterious, unspoken connection to Bernard Cribbins’ character, who could see her and who the Doctor described as someone he’d be proud to have as a dad. Mutated version of the TV movie’s “half-human” idea? Or terrible plot cul-de-sac to be buried forever? You decide!

4) Does the Doctor Have Sex? There’s certainly no on-screen evidence. Sure, he’s surrounded by nubile young women, and sure, the new series seems to show him all lovey-dovey in a chaste fashion. And sure, he mentions that he was a father, and sure, back in the very first episode, he was traveling with his grand-daughter…but does that mean he has sex?

A lot of fans say “no”. They feel that sex is a distinctly human quality, and part of the Doctor’s essential “alien-ness” is that he doesn’t show much, if any, interest in sex. (The classic line, from Douglas Adams’ script for “City of Death”: “Well, you’re a beautiful woman, probably…”) For a big contingent of fans, the Doctor even functions as an iconic gay sci-fi hero. Sure, he doesn’t overtly snog guys, but at the same time, most of his female relationships have a certain “Will and Grace” quality to them. These fans have come up with some fairly elaborate rationales for the presence of biological relatives like Susan (see below) and ignore everything but the most blatant evidence of sex. (They ignore the most blatant evidence, too.)

5) Lives Before Hartnell. The same rationale that explains Susan’s existence in a fairly convoluted fashion (look up “Lungbarrow” if you want to know) also explains away one of the most tantalizing bits of fanservice in the series: The extra faces you see in “The Brain of Morbius”. See, the Doctor and Morbius (an evil Time Lord who tried to conquer the universe from exile, and was reduced to a brain in a jar) have a “brain-bending” duel, where they’re placed in direct telepathic contact and try to regress each other’s minds to infancy. The regressed lives are shown as faces on a handy screen, and it seems like Morbius handily pushes the Doctor back through his third, second, and first incarnation…and then eight more faces appear on the screen before Morbius’ brain explodes from the strain. The production team at the time claimed that these were intended to be pre-Hartnell incarnations, suggesting several lifetimes’ adventures before “An Unearthly Child”. Every subsequent production team has ignored this, setting clear limits on the number of Time Lord incarnations, specifying their order, and establishing Hartnell as the first.

And yet, like the “Paul Is Dead” myth, this one will not die. Believers of the pre-Hartnell theory come up with elaborate explanations as to how the Doctor could have lived more than thirteen lives, pointing to the Fifth/Thirteenth Doctor’s cryptic dialogue (“I might regenerate…feels different, this time…”) and the erratic post-regenerative personality of the Sixth Doctor as hints that the regeneration was a truly unique event that has yet to be explained. (These people are insane. Argue with them at your peril.)

Those are the top five, but there are undoubtedly a ton I missed. Forty-seven years of continuity will generate that sort of thing. Feel free to mention yours in the comments!

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–”Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible but something that gets plugged into stories like a widget, without any thought on the part of the writer.

For example:

Bionics: Or, as we say in the real world, prosthetics – which are, of course, becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. What they’re not doing is making anyone superhuman. Go take a look at a VA hospital (and by the way, how much of an opportunity did the people behind Bionic Woman remake miss by not making her an Iraq vet?). Nobody there is lifting cars or taking spy photos with their camera eyes; they’re lucky if they can get anything like the former abilities of the limb or body part being replaced, and even if they give an advantage in one area (as Oscar Pistorius’ legs supposedly did) it’s pretty limited. Even if you could make a bionic limb super-strong, of course, the problem is that the hand bone’s connected to the wrist bone, the wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone, and so on, and that whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So superhuman strength is pretty much off the menu (you could conceivably build a bionic hand with superhuman crushing power that wouldn’t stress the wrist too much, but that’s about it) unless you replace basically the whole skeletal structure, which brings us to…

Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Not that either of these things are necessarily impossible (though both involve a fair bit of handwaving, especially the copying-memories part of the latter), but neither are they any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you, which will no more prevent you from dying than having children will. With that in mind, it baffles me why anyone would want to do either of these. Who would want to have an immortal or, worse, much younger copy of yourself around? How would that take the sting out of aging and death? Not to mention the fact that you would be made to suffer Robert Burns’ most terrible curse: to see ourselves as others see us. Most of us can’t stand to hear a recording of our own voices; imagine that magnified by a factor of a million and you’ll get the idea of just how annoying and uncomfortable it would be to have a simulacrum of you wandering around.

Sensors: Such an innocuous bit of technology, those machines that let Mr. Spock or whoever tell you what’s going on down on the planet. Unfortunately, nothing like them actually exists. For example, one thing people can always tell with sensors is the presence or absence of “life signs.” How do they do that? It can’t be through infrared or heartbeats, since neither of those would be detectable from space (well, infrared could be, but not individual heat signatures) – but the magical sensors usually can not only detect individual life forms but tell you what species it is! Sensors are practically the definition of the unquestioned assumption; they’re such a background element that hardly anyone bothers to think before plugging them into a story. (This goes double for tractor beams.)

Space combat: This is probably the most commonly appearing one on the list, but think about it for a minute. Actual combat mostly consists of one person trying to get to a target, and the other one trying to stop them; a fighter-interceptor trying to stop a bomber, for instance (or disabling the bomber’s fighter escort.) That works all right when your battleground is the sky, because there are a limited number of possible approaches and escape routes. But when the target is a planet that limited number increases until it approaches infinity – so it’s likely that your fighter-interceptors will simply be unable to intercept anything.

Aside from that, though, the notion of space war is equally unlikely. Even if we assume the existence of FTL travel (something that would have been on this list thirty years ago, but which writers have more recently made more of an effort to justify), it’s almost certainly going to take a lot of energy to get from star to star; what could be waiting there that would be worth the effort involved? You might argue, of course, that war pretty much always takes a lot of energy and that’s never stopped anyone, but the fact is that almost everything of value on an inhabited planet can also be found on uninhabited planets, asteroids or comets. Sure, you can come up with some other reason for an interplanetary war – an ideological difference, some genuinely unique resource, a pathological hatred of the colour blue – but by this point you’re either handwaving or actually giving the matter some thought, which means it’s no longer an unquestioned assumption.

Sol III: This is a pet peeve of mine. SF writers figured out a long time ago that aliens wouldn’t call our planet “Earth,” so you often see it referred to as “Sol III,” which sounds much more science-fictiony. The problem, of course, is that “sol” is Latin for “sun,” which means that instead of calling the planet “Earth” you’ve called it “Sun III” – so much less geocentric!

None of these are bad ideas, necessarily – except for that last one – but I’m tired of seeing them recycled over and over like so much dorm room furniture. So here’s my challenge to everyone who writes SF in novels, movies, comics or wherever: the next time you’re about to use one of these ideas, think it through – odds are good that after a few minutes’ consideration you’ll wind up with a more interesting and original story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dynamite idea for an epic about bionic space marines I need to work on…

Obviously, this post is a few days late; what can I say, I spent the weekend at CONvergence (a Twin Cities-based sci-fi convention) and am just now recovered enough to think about posting something. I still haven’t thought of anything particularly impressive, though, so I’m just going to be lazy and throw out a few books that I think would make great movies. (Or, at least, could. Let’s face it; everyone thought there was a good movie in I, Robot, and nobody thought there was a good one in Who Censored Roger Rabbit?)

1. Phule’s Company. I’ve actually blogged about this one on my own blog, Fraggmented, but it’s been a while and it does belong here. It’s a scenario tailor-made for Hollywood; a band of misfit soldiers and failures gets taken over by an eccentric billionaire officer and becomes one of the elite fighting units of the Galactic Legion. David Tennant would make an absolutely perfect Phule, and there’s sequels ready-made (although the book series goes rapidly downhill once Aspirin stops writing the books himself.)

2. Those Who Hunt the Night. This Barbara Hambly novel would make an awesome movie; it’s got vampires and spies, and the Victorian era is something that it’s really easy to make good by throwing just a little bit of money at. Basically, think “Sherlock Holmes” in terms of design sense, and add in vampires.

3. World War Z. Yes, I know they’re working on it. WORK FASTER. I want to see soldiers battling zombies in an epic battle for the fate of the world, and I want to see it now. Screw “Walking Dead”, this is the zombie story America is waiting for.

4. Magic Kingdom For Sale Sold! Some people might prefer Terry Brooks’ Shannara series, but I always found them to be fairly bland fantasy, and bland “epic” fantasy at that. Nothing like a movie that needs to film in seventy-two different locations because someone had to transcribe every random encounter from their campaign notes. Magic Kingdom has a lot more personality, a smarter hook, and a strong ending to boot.

5. Undead and Unwed. Oh, look! More vampires! But this is as far away from Those Who Hunt the Night as it’s possible to get: It’s a smart, silly action/comedy/romance along the lines of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a vampire Chosen One named Betsy who doesn’t take the vampire “rules” seriously. And yet, it’s nowhere near as irritating and sucky as Twilight. You could even film it in the Twin Cities (where it’s set, and where author Mary Janice Davidson lives.)

Those are five of mine, but there are plenty more; feel free to add yours in the comments section!

So I been thinking that it’s time I stopped working at the pet store because seriously, the pet store sucks. You’re over by the doggy bins and you’re marking down the puppies because they’re a month old now and they just look at you like “if you drop my price by another two hundred dollars can I have a family pleeeeeeease?” And then you look over at this one basset hound who’s not even a puppy anymore and you’ve marked him down four times now so he’s only five hundred dollars and he’s just given up on everything, he just lies in the corner waiting for the end he knows is coming.

Also, the pay sucks. They could at least pay me thirteen dollars an hour to take care of the depressed dogs, and also the depressed cats and the depressed parrot and the lizards, who are probably not depressed but are kind of stupid.

So it’s time for a new job! And I have decided that I am going to be a published author! Now I know what you are thinking, you are thinking “but Flapjacks you have never ever written anything except awesome blog entries which totally steal the show from MGK, how will you become the next Stephen King? Will it involve murder?” No! Of course it will not involve murder. Murder doesn’t get you published. Unless you kill somebody really really famous and important and then get a successful insanity defense and then thirty years later all is forgiven and you write a memoir. Or if you are O.J. Simpson. But regardless neither of these options appeals to me, so murder is right out.

No, I will become a famous published author on the virtue of my prose. My book is tentatively titled The Civil War Never Happened. (I need a better title. Maybe The Lie Between The States. Or something catchy. One of you come up with something! I am too busy becoming a published author to think of a title!) It is about how the Civil War never actually happened, and all that stuff you hear about the Civil War is just a toxic smokescreen invented by liberals to make real patriotic Americans feel bad about loving their country.

Consider!

- Civil War theorists claim that the Civil War happened between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. But this eminently makes no sense. For starters, in the beginning, there was just a United States of America… and nowadays, there is just a United States of America. Do these Civil War theorists seriously claim that a whole other country just showed up one day, and then ever so conveniently went away? Don’t you think that’s just a little suspicious? Who do these liberals think they’re kidding?

- Civil War theorists claim that the Civil War happened because of slavery. But if it happened because of slavery, then where did all the slaves go? Kind of handy for them to just stop being slaves, all at once! That’s like, supposedly, a million people or so! Who all decided to quit their job! Can you imagine what that would do to the economy today if everybody who worked at Taco Bell (which, I have it on good authority, is just like slavery) just up and quit? It would be chaos! And yet, the Civil War theorists would have you believe that these ex-slaves just all went and got new jobs and the U.S. economy was fine and dandy. Uh-huh.

- Civil War theorists would have you believe that there is ample evidence that slavery happened. However, this is all based on a misconception. See, one of the great extinct species of North America, like the dodo and the passenger pigeon, is the polled slaverford (pronounced “SLAV-eh-ford”), a curiously thin-necked breed of cattle. Modern-day “historians” have mistaken records of the great slaverford drives of the south for ownership of people, and tarred honest Southern cattle barons with crimes against humanity which they did not even commit! They pull forth slaverford chains, which were used to drive herds of the cattle across the Southern prairies, and mistakenly assume that they are intended for use on humans. You could almost pity these poor liberal academics who have never been out in the real world, and therefore do not know that the polled slaverford was hunted to death by Irish immigrants in the early 20th century, and that mention of the slaverford in history books was excised by President Kennedy in order to protect his ancestors’ honour.

- Liberal imagineers claim that the Stars and Bars is a “Confederate” battle flag, but in fact there is ample evidence which you can read about in my book which makes it clear that the Stars and Bars was a reward given to the thirteen most patriotic-est states of the Union by Abraham Lincoln himself!

- Civil War believers claim that the Civil War cost the lives of over 200,000 men. However, what they fail to account for is that during the supposed dates of the Civil War, there were no less than three smallpox epidemics as well as a cholera pandemic, dengue, tuberculosis, dropsy, okie-pokie-smokie, and the dreaded “Iowa flu.” It didn’t take a war to kill all those men: they just all got sick and died in a perfect storm of bacteria! Those bodies with bullets in them? Brave American soldiers, both wearing the Blue of the Army and the original Gray of the Marine Corps Auxiliary Marching Band (people really liked their marches in the 19th century), who committed suicide rather than take up valuable doctoring resources, making the ultimate patriotic sacrifice for Mom and apple pie.

- Why the Lie? (Oooh, maybe that should be the sub-title.) Why perpetuate the lie that is the Civil War? Clearly, it is the work of liberal academics out of touch with Real America, who are in cahoots with big business interests like Big Costume, Big Fake Historical Rifles, Big Camping Supplies and Big Bugle. Seriously, did you really, really think there was a place called “Appamattox” before 1943? World War II was the excuse this dreadful conspiracy needed to rewrite American history! While brave young soldiers were off fighting Hitler and… uh… the Japanese leader guy, the imagineers were going around inventing a new history so that when they got home, they’d feel guilty about being Southern, because liberals hate hush puppies and bluegrass music! And then they would have the gall to profit off them! Doesn’t that make you mad as all heck?

So anyways, that’s my book, and even as I finish up this blog post I have already gotten four offers to publish the book before I even hit “publish” in WordPress, so I’m totally sure this is going to work out just fine, guys oh my god I’m gonna make so much money. Do they make swimming pools for money like they do in Uncle Scrooge comics? I bet those are awesome in real life.

I make no secret of it; I adore the Marvel Essentials line of trade paperbacks. My own blog, Fraggmented, has dozens of posts devoted to these insane 500+ page black-and-white chunks of classic comics, each one giving you twenty or more issues of a title for an almost sickeningly reasonable cost. (Some of the collections of late 80s and early 90s comics, like X-Men and Wolverine, actually give you the comics for less than the original cover price.) There’s something so wonderful about being able to sit down with a comic and see the long-term plotlines unfolding in front of your eyes, taking in years of development in just a few volumes. I’ve been buying these for years now, picking up classic runs of Fantastic Four and Avengers for a song and taking a chance on comics like Man-Thing and Killraven that I probably wouldn’t have bought if not for the cheapness of the format. I won’t say that this is the last word on the subject–heck, I could probably do a whole other post on the similar Showcase Presents line at DC–but here are my top ten Essentials for those of you interested in dipping in.

10. Captain America, Volume 1-4. There’s a Volume Five coming out soon, and I’ll probably buy that when finances permit as well. For all that Captain America is seen nowadays as a stodgy, stuffy agent of the status quo, he was originally a counter-culture firebrand and a lens through which a variety of excellent writers looked at the changing face of America. And for all that Ed Brubaker tries to inject some “edginess” into Cap, he’s still light-years away from the smack-talking rebel Stan Lee once wrote, and you’ll be amazed at how interesting Steve Rogers was as a person before Mark Gruenwald bowdlerized him in the 80s. (Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what Gruenwald did, but he seriously blanded down Steve Rogers’ personality.) The series is a little inconsistent, but there are long stretches of good stuff in every volume. Highlights include Cap fighting it out with Nixon on the White House lawn, and delivering a humiliating smack-down to a villain that was so thorough the character never appeared again.

9. Defenders, Volumes 1-3. Actually, you could probably stick to the first two books and come away happy–Steve Gerber’s magnum opus that closed out his run on Defenders hasn’t entirely aged well, and comes off a little pretentious now that the 70s culture that nurtured it has faded away. But this is still a classic Defenders run, and the reason the series is fondly remembered long after the multitude of failed relaunches and reunions. (Tip for prospective Defenders relaunchers: If you go back and read these books, the Silver Surfer and Namor left the team after about five issues. For the most part, the stable Defenders team was Doc, Hulk, Hellcat, Valkyrie and Nighthawk.)

8. Power Man, Volume 1. It’s interesting to see the way that Luke Cage has been almost a cultural mirror of African-Americans over the course of his appearances in the Marvel Universe; he went from being a raw, hard-edged underdog who refused to let his oppression at the hands of a racist prison system break his spirit, to a walking comedy jive stereotype, to a street hustler and borderline thug, and finally to a cynical, worldly-wise veteran of the revolutionary 70s. But he was never better than in his first few appearances, when his character was treated with total sincerity by writer Archie Goodwin, and it’s worth picking up the book to read those old stories. (The later volumes are good too, as is the Iron Fist solo series, but I’m sticking with the best stuff for purposes of this list.)

7. Silver Surfer, Volume 2. Volume 1 is fairly readable, more notable for its lovely Buscema art than its stories, but Volume 2 is where the story really begins. Steve Englehart finally figures out how to make the Surfer work in a way that no previous writer ever had, simply by freeing him from his imprisonment on Earth and putting him in space, his natural millieu. You’ll need to have a tolerance for certain Englehart-isms (oh, look! It’s Mantis again! And she’s even more bad-ass!) but the series is space opera at its epic best. Definitely deserving of a third volume.

6. X-Men, Volumes 1-4. Yes, it’s probably blasphemy to put the Claremont/Byrne era of the X-Men this low on the list, but trust me–when you actually go back and read them, you find that all of Claremont’s annoying little tics as a writer (his over-narration and purple prose, his borderline creepy obsession with his female characters, his habit of having everyone reiterate their major personality traits for the reader every few pages) didn’t start when he returned to the series in the 21st century. Even so, this was a collaboration that was more than the sum of its parts, and the work they did here has let every subsequent writer coast on their efforts, so it’s worth picking up just to get the backstory.

5. Spectacular Spider-Man, Volumes 1-2. Bronze Age Spider-Man was always a treat–in the wake of the death of Gwen Stacy, there was always a feeling of uncertainty and adventurousness about the title. Just like in the early days, there were no sacred cows…or at least, it seemed like it…and this is some particularly fine Bronze Age Spider-Man. You’ll find Gerry Conway, Roger Stern and Marv Wolfman all writing the title in these two volumes, and those guys are master craftsmen of a sort that the medium just doesn’t turn out anymore. (OK, I tell a lie. Jeff Parker and Fred van Lente have shown huge chops in that regard as well. But Roger Stern still shows everyone How It Is Freaking Done.)

4. Super-Villain Team-Up, Volume 1. Despite my complaints about “decompression” and “event comics” on my own blog, this was a big epic crossover before there were big, epic crossovers, and I love it. Doctor Doom and Namor team up to crush the surface world, only to wind up opposing each other in a gigantic saga of double-crosses, clashing egos, and duels of sheer will between two of Marvel’s best bad guys. There are a few other stories that close out the book (the “Red Skull vs. Hitler” one is a classic, as well) but you’re buying this one for the big Doom/Namor war, and it’s worth it.

3. Doctor Strange, Volume 1. Speaking of collaborations that are more than the sum of their parts, this is Ditko and Lee at their finest. Doctor Strange’s origin story has the elegant wonder of a child’s fairy tale, and the stories that follow introduce an entire epic mythos of cosmic strangeness that has probably never been equaled in the comic-book medium. (Perhaps by Lovecraft in the pulps, but nobody did weird tales in comics the way Ditko and Lee did it.) Later volumes are alright as well, but they’re definitely all trying to imitate the effortless grace of these awesome early stories.

2. Tomb of Dracula, Volumes 1-4. A bold, experimental, almost unprecedented comic, this Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan collaboration (they worked together on almost the entire run of the series) puts the focus on Dracula not as a mere monster, but as a tortured soul in the vein of Milton’s Satan. He is constantly the prisoner of his own pride as much as anything else, denied the delights of a living existence and yet unwilling to surrender to death. As drawn by Colan’s gorgeous, evocative, moody pencils (this is one book I’d recommend in black and white over color), it’s a helluva ride, especially given that Wolfman also gives us a great group of sympathetic vampire hunters to root for. (Yes, this is where Blade first shows up. He’s not even the coolest of the bunch.)

1. Spider-Man, Volume 1. And this is Lee and Ditko at even finer than their finest. It’s a collaboration that finally burned them out on each other, but what the hell, the Beatles didn’t last forever either. And this…every single Spider-Man writer since then, including Stan Lee himself, has been trying to recapture the singular alchemy of these 22 issues. Everything from Spider-Man’s origin to his battles with the Chameleon, the Lizard, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Kraven the Hunter, the Enforcer, the Green Goblin, Electro, the Sinister Six and the Scorpion has damn near been carved into stone as the Way Spider-Man Should Be, and here Lee and Ditko seem to bring it off almost casually. Much has been made of the question of “Who deserves the credit for these?”, but that misses the point; Lee needed Ditko’s imagination and unflinching moral sensibility, and Ditko needed Lee’s humanizing touch and deft dialogue. If you’re someone who thinks that Stan Lee is a tired old hack who had more of a knack for self-promotion than for writing, read this comic. It still holds up, even after all these years.

A few people emailed me after the last time I had an open call for post requests asking me to “rip into” George R.R. Martin for taking such a long-ass time finishing the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which… no. I mean, just no. Even if we could get around the amazing hypocrisy of me calling someone out for taking a long time to finish a creative work, it’s something I just wouldn’t do regardless, because writers work at their own speed and it’s not a uniform process that’s the same for everybody so expecting Martin to crank out books on a yearly basis like Terry Pratchett does is silly and also Neil Gaiman said stuff I agree with. And so forth.

But I will say this: by getting HBO to sign on to a Game of Thrones series, Martin has – intentionally or not – set himself a deadline. And he’s set himself this deadline for one reason: he’s written a series which features young characters which is now being converted into an ongoing telefilmic series. In order for that series to work, it needs to film itself as quickly as possible. (It can be released on whatever schedule HBO likes, but that’s a different thing entirely.)

Think about it for a second. People complain quite frequently that the young actors in the Harry Potter movies have aged too quickly to portray the characters effectively. Now, granted, this is a pretty stupid complaint given that the first movie started production in 2000, when Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint were all eleven (just like in the book), and thanks to a fanatical devotion to cranking the movies out on a schedule that would probably be considered near-slavery if it weren’t for the enormous salaries involved for everybody working on it, they’re just about finished shooting the double-film adaptation of Deathly Hallows now, ten years later. Filming seven years’ worth of progression in ten years is honestly pretty amazing – and people still complain that Radcliffe, Watson and Grint have aged too much.

But the Harry Potter experience is nothing compared to what awaits production on A Game of Thrones and so forth, because the latter is a series of novels where young protagonists go through much more in an even shorter timespan: as of the end of the fourth book, they’ve covered in between two and a half and three years. Assuming that the rest of the series follows this pace, that’s seven novels covering about five years and change. Given that some major characters – Bran and Arya Stark, for example, as well as lesser characters like Thomen Baratheon – are out-and-out little kids (not even tweens), these series are going to have to film relatively close to one another, even faster than release times in order to keep from aging the younger characters too fast onscreen. (Especially considering that it’s been made clear that the show plans to produce one season per novel.) If they don’t, the show has the danger of pulling a Walt-from-Lost, where they have a young character clearly aging faster than the timeline of the show he’s on can handle.

Now, this isn’t impossible to film. Difficult, yes, but certainly not impossible – especially given HBO’s production budgets and the likely enormous return on investment. But all of this difficulty puts Martin’s back up against a wall, because up until now it was just his ass on the line if he got further delayed in finishing the books. Now it’s not just him: it’s everybody working on these shows. Previously the only other people affected by Martin’s slow writing speed were maybe a few people at a publishing company and some fans with an enormous sense of entitlement. Now, though, it’s a horde of people who are completely dependent on him finishing the books so they can produce the TV shows.

I don’t know if Martin can handle that pressure or not. I hope he can. I just know that I wouldn’t want it.

“Good morning, sir. I have prepared a breakfast of scrambled egg, kippers and bacon, as per your request.”
“Fantastic, Jeeves! I tell you truly, I’ve worked up a massive appetite and that’s no mistake.”
“Am I to assume that tonight’s excursion went well, sir?”
“Well, it started off a bit sticky. My cape got all tangled when I went to punch this one hooligan in the face.”
“Ah, yes. The cape.”
“Jeeves, we’ve had this discussion twice now. The cape is part of the ensemble.”
“We have had this discussion twice, sir, because your cape has gotten tangled up in your legs twice.”
“Ah ha, Jeeves. I didn’t say it got tangled in my legs this time, merely that it had gotten tangled.”
“In what did it get tangled?”
“Well, around my right arm.”
“Is that not your good arm for fisticuffs, sir?”
“Don’t be coy. You know it is. And the cape stays.”
“I confess, I fail to understand the appeal of the cape.”
“It’s dramatic, Jeeves. Like a bat’s wings. Criminals fear it, I reckon.”
“Do criminals fear gentlemen in opera cloaks?”
“Ah, but this is cut differently from an opera cloak. It rupples.”
“Rupples, sir?”
“Yes. It ruffles and it ripples. Therefore, it rupples.”
“This ruppling of which you speak seems to have a great deal in common with tangling.”
“Enough talk about that, Jeeves. I think I’ve made it quite clear that the cape represents my bat-wings, for I am a child of the night, and so forth.”
“Could not some other form of abstraction suffice, sir?”
“Well, without the wings, I’m hardly a bat, am I? I’m sort of a black badger.”
“I understand badgers can be quite nasty in a pinch.”
“Yes, but it’s not like a great roaring badger came smashing through my window at Brinkley, is it? It was a bat. That’s an omen, Jeeves. Can’t mess about with omens, that’s bad luck.”
“Sir, a bat did not crash through your window either. You dreamt it.”
“Dream omens are still omens.”
“I concede the point.”
“Thank you, Jeeves. By the way, this is really cracking nosh.”
“I do my best, sir. So what happened after your encounter with the criminal class?”
“Oh, that wasn’t the only one.”
“Indeed?”
“You see, after I dropped off those thugs at the local constabulary -”
“Speaking of which, sir, that Detective Gordon fellow has been around again, asking after you. I do believe he suspects.”
“Drat. Are you sure?”
“Quite sure, sir.”
“I wonder how he caught on. I’ve been doing the growly voice, you know. Doesn’t sound a thing like me at all.”
“Yes, sir, but you also did the growly voice when you did your impersonation of a bear for the Policemen’s Charitable Association last month.”
“Do you think that tipped anybody off, then?”
“I would consider it possible.”
“Oh, by the way, Jeeves, while we’re on the topic, did you pick up lozenges for me?”
“Yes, sir. Blackcurrant, as you requested.”
“Brilliant. Where was I?”
“You had just dropped off some criminals with the police.”
“Exactly. I had some time left in the night, you see, so I wandered down to the dockyards, hoping to catch some criminals doing criminalish things.”
“And did you, sir?”
“Did I ever! This was the astounding thing, Jeeves – there was this band of bravos robbing a freighter!”
“Is that really so surprising, sir? Freighters are frequently the target of the unlawful.”
“I wouldn’t call this normal.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t I mention the fellow in the makeup?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, there was one.”
“What sort of makeup, sir? Was he dressed for a pantomime?”
“Not quite so much that, Jeeves, as he was garbed like a clown.”
“What sort of clown, sir? Traditional whiteface, auguste, or are we speaking more of the comedia dell’arte variety of Italian clown?”
“…which one is the one that wears purple pants?”
“That would most likely be auguste.”
“Anyway. This clown was in charge of the other criminals.”
“That seems most improper. An auguste clown is known for being subservient to the whiteface. It appears, sir, that your adversary has no formal training in clowning.”
“I suspected as much when he started hitting me on the head with his brolly.”
“Did you apprehend him in the end?”
“No, no, that’s the rub. I got his underlings, you can bet on that, but the big cheese, as they say, ran away with the milk and the spoon.”
“So he escaped.”
“Shame, too. I suspect this clown will make up a good deal more work for me. Oh, did you catch that? “Make up.” Totally by accident.”
“Your wit remains sharp, sir.”
“Thanks, Jeeves. Anyway, it’s been a long night, so it’s to bed for Bertie, I think. Wake me up around two, would you?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“Oh, and did you ask about -”
“Yes, I did inquire with the owner of the building as you requested. It seems that he is not keen on the idea of tenants putting in major construction projects in his apartments.”
“So that means no secret passage to the cellar, then?”
“Sadly not.”
“Drat. A secret base in the cellar would have been extremely thematic.”
“Bats do not often dwell in cellars, I believe.”
“It was a metaphor, Jeeves. A bat must have his cave, you know.”
“Or a badger his hole?”
“Do stop going on about badgers, Jeeves.”
“Certainly, sir.”

Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it.

It was a funny enough story that even the New York Times ran it, but it got me wondering: now that pubic waxing is apparently de rigueur among young women, are female genitals even called beavers anymore? I mean, when the hair is gone, the resemblance pretty well disappears.

So will “beaver” wind up being one of those funny little linguistic artifacts, like calling a remote control a “clicker” decades after they switched from sonics to infrared, or should the magazine just have held out until we start calling women’s privates “chinchillas”?

Bonus: Apparently the term “beaver” in this sense was popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. I couldn’t find Vonnegut’s drawing of a beaver anywhere online, so here is his rendition of an asshole.