A few weeks ago, I suggested the idea of a Geek Guide to Everything, a sort of A-Z of geek interests that a young and inexperienced fan of cult fiction could use to pick up information on the things they were likely to hear about from folks with similar interests. The idea was not fondly received, judging by the comments. Most people seemed to feel that it was a bit didactic; telling a new fan what they “should” be into instead of letting them discover things for themselves.

This sort of surprised me, because that’s exactly what I used “episode guide” books for. On subjects where I don’t really see myself as likely to get into a topic (like, for example, anime or the Stargate series) but don’t want to feel completely left out every time there’s a conversation that references the topic, I pick up a guide to it, read that, and at least gain a cursory knowledge of the situation. Sometimes, like with Buffy or Babylon 5, I wind up interested enough that I later get into the topic, but at least this way I’m not completely in the dark. To me, a “Guide to Everything” would just be an expansion of the basic concept.

But again, judging by the response, this isn’t how most people use these guides. So I thought I’d ask what most people do buy an episode guide for. Because they’re certainly popular; there are whole publishers out there who make their living doing pop culture non-fiction media guides. But if people don’t buy guides to things they’re unfamiliar with, what do they read them for? Is it to get another perspective on a show they already like? Is it simply to reminisce about their favorite series? I can understand both of those views; after all, I do think I’m on my tenth or eleventh guide to Doctor Who, and I may even be up into the teens. Then again, even in those cases I’m reading them to learn, because Doctor Who is one of those series that’s difficult and expensive and time-consuming to watch in its entirety and I am learning what happened in stories I haven’t had the chance to watch.

So the question is out to the blog-reading audience: Why do you read episode guides? What do you get out of them? (I don’t know that people who find episode guides pointless will get much out of these comments, really, but if you feel that you have something to contribute besides the basic fact that you find them pointless and you want your voice heard, feel free to chime in too. I promise next week you’ll have the chance to talk about comics or science fiction or zombie apocalypses or something.)

(Major spoilers in this post, obviously, for the whole Wheel of Time series, and for the fourteenth book specifically. You have been warned.)

So my copy of A Memory of Light arrived on Tuesday and I basically spent the last week reading it, and – as the post title indicates – it is great. Basically the reason for this is that is pulls off a full Return of the Jedi juggle – by which I mean in Jedi, Richard Marquand and Sean Barton (and okay, George Lucas) spend the last third of the movie cutting back and forth between three exciting action sequences – the battle on Endor between the Ewoks/Rebels and Stormtroopers, the battle above Endor between the Rebel Fleet and the Imperial Fleet, and the battle in the Death Star between Vader, Luke and the Emperor – and the film does this while also using those action sequences to build in its character beats, which is why Jedi is a satisfying end to the trilogy.1

The reason AMoL is so fun is that it does what Jedi does, except instead of cutting in between three action sequences, it cuts in between as many as twenty to thirty.

But that’s hardly the only reason. AMoL is the final payoff for a fourteen-book-long cycle. Now, granted, this is the point in the discussion where the haters will all pop up to brag about how they quit at book nine or book seven or whatever2 but all they are doing is belaboring a point. I don’t think there is anybody who is really willing to stand up and say that the middle of the series doesn’t drag on and get tedious, because oh my do they ever.3 But that is the point I am making here: AMoL actually manages to make up for all of that wasted time and flabby middle-third writing, because it is simply just that entertaining. Just about every sequence in the nook is payoff for some element of the series – of course given that we’re talking about fourteen books that shouldn’t be surprising because, well, that’s a lot of elements to pay off – and because of that every part of the book is filled with grade-A one hundred percent fuckyeah.

Every baddie gets their comeuppance, of course, but the body count for the good guys is extremely high, like Pelennor Fields-level high (or even moreso since, let’s be honest, most of the named people who died in the Pelennor Fields weren’t characters with a lot of speaking time – and some very major characters end up biting it). The baddies are very, very bad and the book sells, mostly successfully, the entire Last Battle as a giant game of wits between the two sides, with both of them getting major tactical successes. Demandred finally shows up in this book after all of us waiting for thirteen books to wait and see how he was going to live up to the hype, and while Rand is off fighting the Dark One, Demandred serves as the Final Boss for basically everybody else in the book as the general of Evil Army and holy shit does he ever justify all his buildup.

Anyway. I’m glad I didn’t wait for the remainder bins on this one, because the entire book is like one extended guitar solo with lasers and fireworks and Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy and then more lasers. Not that I was going to do so (as I have previously admitted), so I guess it is more appropriate to say “I’m glad I bought it immediately and it justified the purchase.”

1. Yes, even though the Ewoks suck and Empire is the better film, yes, we know… [↩]
2. Or of course the ever-popular “I knew it sucked from the beginning!” [↩]
3. Generally speaking, the general agreement among people who like the series but are willing to be honest is that books five and six are bulky but still entertaining, book seven is where it starts to drag, books eight and nine are the low point, book ten shows a few signs towards the end of poking out of the molasses, and book eleven is where the series kicks back into high gear as if to make up for lost time. [↩]

When I said that to my wife a bit ago, she looked at me and said, “I have no idea what you mean by that.” I’m kind of assuming you feel the same way, so I’ll explain.

A traditional ‘alternate universe’ story, which is something that just about every sci-fi/fantasy series gets to from time to time, is like pornography in that it’s really just the same thing each time with very little variation. Each AU storyline purports to focus on a single point of divergence that has sent history down a different path…but the differences are never so great as to preclude instant audience identification. (For example, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise”, twenty years of war with the Klingon Empire hasn’t resulted in any advances in technology beyond the Galaxy class starship, the Enterprise hasn’t been destroyed and replaced by the E or F, and all of the bridge crew have not only survived but have wound up in the exact same command positions on the exact same ship. Likewise, Giles is still assigned to the Hellmouth and despite the subtext of many episodes involving the idea that what separates Buffy from other Slayers who’ve died young is her friendships and connections with the everyday world, the only sign that Buffy is any less skilled as a Slayer is the little scar on her lip.)

The “twists” to this reality are designed, like porn, to provide simple and visceral thrills. They are less intended as logical consequence of any particular point of divergence as they are to give the audience the specific excitement of breaking well-established narrative rules. The premature death of Charles Xavier, for example, doesn’t lead to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because Charles Xavier did anything in particular, it leads to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because it’s the only chance that Marvel has to show a world where the bad guys won and the heroes are a desperate resistance movement. In the much later “Here Comes Tomorrow” storyline, Beast isn’t a villain because it’s a logical extension of Scott’s retirement from the team; he’s a villain because showing a fan favorite hero as the villain is a staple of alternate universe stories. (Another common trope is best exemplified in the ‘Magik’  series, where the cute and winsome Shadowcat is shown, in the alternate dimension of Limbo, as being a hardened warrior. The series also shows charming and friendly Nightcrawler as a lecherous villain…basically, you can chalk up 95% of alternate universe stories to the combinations of “set in a dystopian reality”, “well-liked hero is a villain”, “infamous villain is a good guy”, and “comic relief/peril monkey character is a total bad-ass”.)

And, like pornography, alternative universe stories have their own version of the “money shot”. If you accept the idea that the breaking of series narrative conventions in an AU story is the sci-fi/fantasy series equivalent of the sex in porn (and roughly the same amount of time is devoted in AU stories to showing how different and unexpected the alternative timeline is as is devoted to the sex in a porn movie), then the natural “climax” is the ultimate breaking of narrative convention, the death of characters who normally are given a protected status by their role in the story. Buffy is always safe in the Buffyverse (and possibly the only person who is)…so therefore, she has to die at the end of ‘The Wish’. ‘Days of Future Past’ has to end with a bloodbath, because it’s the only time Chris Claremont can get away with incinerating Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Magneto in a single issue.

Does this mean that alternate universe stories are without merit? No. Like porn, there are wide variations in quality. (‘Days of Future Past’ would be qualified as “erotica” in this analogy, for example.) But it is worth remembering that stories like these always start out with a huge advantage in fan’s affections because that’s really all they’re intended to do. They are stories made to give long-term followers of the series “fangasms”, no more and no less.

Although some have criticized the film’s choice to have white actors portray nonwhite characters in various eras (and, in fairness, nonwhite actors as white characters) as unnecessary given the lack of thematic links between the characters each actor portrays, that was never the point – instead, the point of using the same actors repeatedly, I think, is to provide a grounding sense of unity between the six timeframes the movie is set in, as the storytelling of the editing choices (and I think shifting from the book’s “nested” stories was necessary to make it work on film at all) is jarring as it is; in any case, I have said before I will take a dozen ambitious failures over one unambitious, repetitive “success,” and so this movie gets my support for if it is indeed a failure, it is only barely one, and I do not think I concede even that (and yes, this may be a run-on sentence, but it is a run-on movie, so there).

When Snuff came out last year and was discussed here, several commenters made the point that Pratchett’s writing doesn’t read quite as it used to read, which is true – perhaps he has evolved as a writer, perhaps something to do with his Alzheimer’s, perhaps the fact that he is dictating to his assistant rather than writing himself, or maybe it is a mix of some or all of these elements. (I tend to believe this last one.) The point being: his Discworld books do not “sound” as they used to, and for longtime fans this is problematic.

In any case, Dodger is, in some respects, a clever workaround of that issue, as it is basically a Discworld novel transplanted to a mostly-real-history setting. Dickensian London rather than Ankh-Morpork, Charles Dickens rather than William de Worde, Joseph Bazelgette rather than Leonard da Quirm, Robert Peel rather than Sam Vimes (this one is not too subtle at all, since Vimes is of course derived from Peel), Angela Burdett-Coutts rather than Vetinari. Where Pratchett indulges in fiction he pulls more from Dickens than from Discworld (appropriately, as his writing has, I think, drifted more Dickensian as he’s grown older): Dodger himself is of course an Artful Dodger-as-hero archetype (with more than a bit of a mix-in of Pip from Great Expectations), but Solomon Cohen is very clearly a riff on Fagin and Simplicity reminds me quite a bit of Agnes in David Copperfield, personality-wise. The only distinctly Discworldy thing in the book is the identity of the Outlander, and that reveal works splendidly.

But is it a good book? Mostly, yes. As said, it doesn’t read in the way that Pratchett wrote at his peak; instead it is more in his later, meandering style, but that style is matched to a perspective character (Dodger) who is a meandering sort of person in the “goodnatured but ethically bendy” sort of way. The result is a book where, truthfully, not a lot really happens – you can describe the narrative in a paragraph – but the journey is pleasant, and that makes the difference. Recommended.

So I’ve been busy the last week, not with work (well, I’m always busy with work-a-day work, but you know what I mean). I’ve been busy writing, because Harper Voyager announced this, and I’ve got a half-finished novel that’s at about the 60K word mark and if I bust ass I might be able to submit it by deadline and have it not be shitty.

I’m going to try and maintain the regular posting level for the next few weeks, but if things drop off, things drop off a bit. Sorry, guys. If it looks like I won’t make deadline I will ease off the throttle.

So this admittedly funny post is circulating around the internets, and while people are arguing whether or not Jimmy Carter is underrated (dude was Navy) or betting on whether Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson is the biggest ringer, the one thing they all mostly agree on is that Obama would get killed early on because he’s too nice.

People are underrating Obama because Obama wants to get along, and here is why:

There’s a great Star Trek novel – bear with me, people – by Julia Ecklar called The Kobayashi Maru, which is theoretically about how Kirk, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu all took that famous “built to fail” test, and it’s some of the best Trek writing I’ve ever read, up there with the Zar books by A.C. Crispin or Final Frontier by Diane Carey or How Much For Just The Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford. I know this sounds like total nerdbait, but I am genuinely serious when I say that the top tier of 80s Trek books are simply some of the greatest genre fiction ever written – there’s real genius there, writers who wanted to write Big Sci-Fi Adventure and realized that Trek books were their best option for doing so. If you haven’t read these books, you’re missing out.

So anyway, The Kobayashi Maru is basically four short stories written into a binding narrative. They’re all very good: Kirk recounts how he cheated on the test (and it’s even funnier than it was in the 2009 film, and that was pretty damn funny), Sulu’s story is a melancholy and beautiful meditation on loss and the harsh realities of becoming an adult, and Scotty more or less blows up the universe in his test, which is kind of classic.

But Chekov’s story is brilliant because it skips the Maru test completely and instead proceeds to a second test Starfleet cadets are made to fail, which is basically a giant version of Mafia/Werewolf where everybody is armed with stun lasers: there’s a “spy” whose instruction is to kill everybody else and they have to survive. Chekov and his fellow cadets basically all blow the shit out of one another with their stun lasers and in the process torpedo many a friendship, and at the end, when everybody is “dead,” along comes the instructor. Everybody assumes Chekov is going to win because he “killed” the most other people, and then the instructor drops the bombshell:

They all failed. Like everybody always fails this test, because everybody does what Chekov and his classmates did, because everybody always decides to kill everybody else and survive to “win.” Except, of course, for one person, who realized that the point of the exercise wasn’t “kill everybody else,” because Starfleet doesn’t work that way. What that student did was refuse to play the game: he created a “safe zone” where people could come and show that they could be trusted (by surrendering their weapons) and once you can trust some people, you can extend that trust to more people because you’ve got people to watch your back. The whole “only one survivor” thing is a con, plain and simple. And of course, that student who figured that out was James T. Kirk.

And that is why Obama would win. It’s not about getting along for the sake of getting along. It’s about being smart enough to know what game you’re playing in the first place. And when you’re dealing with “every President fights to the death with knives,” you’ve got to realize most of them are smart enough to know that doing so would probably get them killed, and most of them wouldn’t want to fight anyway. (Jackson and Nixon, yes, but not most of them.)

Obviously, Ayn Rand has been in the news a lot lately. Not because she’s done anything particularly newsworthy herself, of course, but because the new Republican pick for VP has frequently and publicly expressed his admiration of her before being told that loudly talking about how awesome a self-professed atheist is just doesn’t fly in a party that panders almost exclusively to fundamentalist Christians these days. So he made a public repudiation of his love of Ayn Rand’s thirty-year old corpse, while still of course admiring all of the bits of his philosophy that let him be a selfish prick. (Um, this is as good a time as any to mention that yes, this is going to be a post with Views. You may wish to skip it if you love Republicans, Objectivism, or being a selfish prick.)

And whenever Ayn Rand’s name comes up, I always think of Philip K. Dick. Not because the two of them were buddies or anything. I don’t even think they knew each other. Mainly because I read a very interesting book called ‘Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick On Film’, which covers a lot of his life and writing in the process of explaining why his films are so attractive to screenwriters. The section that talked about ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, the novel that eventually became the film ‘Blade Runner’, explained that its genesis came from Dick’s thoughts on World War II and the Holocaust. He genuinely believed that no real human being could do that kind of thing…that while the Nazis might have looked human and sounded human, some fundamental human quality was missing from them that allowed them to perpetuate the atrocities they did. He envisioned a test that would separate the real humans from the fake humans, a psychological evaluation that would separate out those who possessed empathy for others from those who didn’t. This eventually went on to become the Voight-Kampff test, which could sniff out androids mimicking humanity through their inability to care about others.

Which is an interesting idea for a novel, of course, but I never really felt like Dick took it far enough. In the first place, I think his original notion–that people who lack empathy and do terrible things to other people are somehow “not human”–is really more of a convenient dodge than anything else. As much as I might wish it otherwise, Ayn Rand is part of the same species as I am, and is my kith and kin, even though she would fail the Voight-Kampff test. (“You see a turtle by the side of the road, lying on its back.” “The turtle is a leech and a parasite. If it can’t turn itself over, I’m doing the world no favors by allowing it to continue surviving. It will only consume food that should go to better, fitter animals like me.”) She’s a woman who notoriously idolized a sociopathic serial killer, and whose philosophy can best be summed up as “Altruism doesn’t exist. Anyone practicing it is a sucker, and anyone benefiting from it is a leech.” (Which didn’t stop her from collecting Medicare, of course.) Paul Ryan has bought fully into the idea that selfishness is a virtue and kindness a vice, and he’s far from the only one. To pretend that these people are somehow inhuman is to avoid confronting the painful and ugly truth about humanity: Decency is a skill we learn, not a quality we inherit.

And the most complex part of all is that it’s not a skill we ever truly master…and Dick is the prime example. His story that started with the envisioning of a test for empathy is, at its heart, about how it’s morally acceptable to kill people who lack empathy because they’re not really people. They’re things, and you can do whatever you want to things without feeling bad. (Sure, they’re androids, not people. And the Klingons weren’t the Soviets.) Fundamentally, Dick is engaging in one of the most classic ways of avoiding one’s conscience and shutting down empathy, by “otherizing” the people you hate instead of understanding them, while claiming that his purge is a pro-empathy action. He deludes himself into thinking that a man can “retire” androids who look like people, talk like people, act like people all day every day for years…and it won’t cost him any of his soul.

‘Blade Runner’, the film made out of Dick’s novel, at least understands how false that is. Deckard in the film is a burnt-out wreck of a man because his empathy withered and died years ago, not because he’s secretly an android himself. The Voight-Kampff test separates out human beings with empathy from the androids…the androids that live a life of slavery from beginning to all-too-sudden end, exiled into space to do the jobs that humans won’t do. And when they try to escape? We kill them…excuse me. We “retire” them. Because if we call it “retiring” them, we don’t have to think about what we’re doing. We don’t have to understand their fear and pain and anger. In short, we don’t have to empathize with them because we passed the empathy test.

‘Blade Runner’ avoids that paradox for too much of its running length, which is why I would like to see someone else take a crack at it. It’s a drama about slavery where nobody ever suggests that slavery is a bad thing, which is a bit too bloodless for a movie with such an angry contradiction right at its very core. The only time we see even a hint of it is when Roy Batty rescues Deckard at the end, an act that gives the lie to the entire notion that androids are incapable of empathy and forces Deckard to confront the truth: He’s a mass murderer, and he never even thought about it. And given that he gets maybe two lines of dialogue after that, I’d call the film at least a little bit flawed. A sequel that really got into the idea, one that confronted the notions that androids could learn how to be human beings…and that human beings can all too easily forget…could be even better than its predecessor.

I asked this on Twitter and got a lot of responses so I thought I’d double it up here: what do you folks think are the most readable “great books” of literature? My counter-example here is Moby Dick – yes, it’s a Great Novel that explores its themes deeply and expertly, but it’s also a boring slog of a read filled with long technical discussions of whaling that are painful to work through, like if Tom Clancy was really, really into whaling or something.

Popular responses to the question on Twitter included The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Three Musketeers, but both Gatsby and Mockingbird feel kind of like cheats to me because they’re both so recent and therefore more in tune with modern audiences’ experience of reading. But still, I am throwing it out there.

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

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.

I know some were concerned that Unseen Academicals was Terry Pratchett straying away from the tried-and-true elements that make the Discworld books click (I was not one of them, mind you, but more than a few expressed misgivings). Well, Snuff is very much a return to form, as one would expect from a Vimes novel, and in more ways than one since, as opposed to the last few Vimes novels, the primary villain isn’t made clear within the first quarter of the book and then a continuing presence. Well, not unless you want to get all lit’ry and say that “racist society” is the villain, but as good a villain as racist society can be, it’s never the one in the knife fight with Vimes, except metaphorically.

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?

“‘And a time to every purpose under heaven,'” Robinton murmured, his throat almost too tight for him to speak. He felt incredibly tired, overwhelmingly sleepy. “Yes, very true. How splendidly true. And what a wonderful time it has been!”

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.

From last week’s open requests post:

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.

MGK: So it turns out that the people who are putting out Anonymous are also encouraging teachers to run lessons about how Shakespeare did not, in fact, write Shakespeare.
FLAPJACKS: I have no idea what that sentence is about.
MGK: Okay. So, you know Roland Emmerich?
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
MGK: He has directed a movie called Anonymous, which theorizes that the works of William Shakespeare were in fact written by the Earl of Oxford.
FLAPJACKS: …and?
MGK: What do you mean, “and”?
FLAPJACKS: And what blows up?
MGK: Nothing blows up.
FLAPJACKS: That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure the Globe Theatre doesn’t blow up?
MGK: I’m pretty sure, yes.
FLAPJACKS: Oh. So Shakespeare is an alien, then.
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Look, you said this was a Roland Emmerich film, so either something blows up or there is aliens. There are rules about this.
MGK: Nothing blows up and there are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: The Earl of Oxford is an alien, maybe.
MGK: There are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Queen Elizabeth?
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe the Tower of London is a spaceship.
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Well, if there’s no aliens and no explosions, why did Emmerich even make this movie?
MGK: Well, he says “I like big ideas. That’s probably what combines Anonymous with my other films. You know, “What if Shakespeare was a fraud?” Or, “What would happen if finally, in one big storm, we get the bill for all the bad things we’ve done to the environment?” Or, “Godzilla comes to New York.” All big ideas, in a way, and you can say them in one sentence.”
FLAPJACKS: How is “Godzilla comes to New York” a big idea? Godzilla goes to cities and smashes them up. It’s basically the whole point of Godzilla. Godzilla movies are not about him having a nice dinner at a restaurant with Mothra and discussing their midlife crises.
MGK: I think, given the other examples in the sentence, you have to understand that a big idea for Roland Emmerich is not quite what we would call “a big idea” for other people.
FLAPJACKS: “Hey, guys, I just had this big idea! What if an asteroid hit the Earth? No, wait, I got a hundred of these! What if the Titanic sank? I can’t believe nobody’s thought of this yet!”
MGK: Yes. This is the sort of finely tuned mind that decides that a conspiracy about William Shakespeare is a big idea.
FLAPJACKS: Still, is it not worth considering whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Well, maybe we should look at the pros and cons. For a start: his name is William Shakespeare. That seems like a “pro” to me right there.
MGK: That is indeed an excellent point.
FLAPJACKS: But perhaps we should consider the fact that he was, after all, only some lowly schlub and not an educated nobleman of class and leisure. I mean, how could a mere actor know of the existence of far-off countries like Italy and Denmark? It’s not like they had Wikipedia back then.
MGK: I believe they did, however, have books. Also, on occasion, they had foreigners.
FLAPJACKS: Mere trifles. Also, he wrote about aristocrats a lot, so therefore one could credibly argue that William Shakespeare’s plays were therefore written by a noble, because who knows more about nobles than other nobles?
MGK: The problem with this argument is that it therefore logically follows that Snooki from Jersey Shore wrote her own book, rather than having it ghostwritten.
FLAPJACKS: An excellent counter-argument, particularly given Snooki’s emergent status as “next Shakespeare.” Or, should we say, next Earl of Oxford.
MGK: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
FLAPJACKS: Me as well! But that’s not important: what’s important is the undeniable fact that Shakespeare was just a common-as-dirt plebe, and that five hundred years after his death, we can no longer find his original manuscripts proving that he was the writer, so therefore clearly it was a nobleman.
MGK: Yes, you have summed up the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” argument quite neatly. By which, of course, I mean you have demonstrated that it’s really just a bunch of classist garbage spun forth by people who don’t want to admit, for whatever reason, that the greatest writer in the English language was basically just some nobody.
FLAPJACKS: Well, we do have to have standards. I mean, we can’t all be Snooki.
MGK: Throwing up in my mouth again.
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, me too.

A few years back, I had cause to buy the novelization of ‘Infinite Crisis’, by Greg Cox. (I was working on a book project that has since fallen through on account of being terminally over-ambitious and unfinishable, and it involved reading a lot of crossovers.) I didn’t get around to reading it…see “unfinishable and over-ambitious, terminally”, above…but it’s been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. And because I never get rid of a book I paid money for without reading it, I finally sat down and read the damned thing.

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.