Hi all,
After much button-mashing and hair-pulling a team of mighty elves has assembled a new website for us with a fully integrated blog.
Please update your bookmarks and rss feeds accordingly!
See you there!
Sincerely,
Lucien Spelman, Publisher, BBT Magazine
http://www.bbtmagazine.com
r humans, many ill-meaning and outright malevolent, to confound us in attempts to get our money or if that’s not possible, just to hurt or confuse us. 
One of the trickiest thing to balance in a super-hero comic book is keeping your character toeing the fine line between being mythic and being human.
Super-heroes, in many ways, are just the next evolutionary step in a long chain of mythic creations, after all. They are what our society has given us as an answer to our lives and times, just as Homer's Odysseus and his adventures were what were needed in ancient Greece.
Odysseus is a wonderful example of a super-hero from ages past, in that he carried on with many adventures, some of them rather extreme and difficult to believe. He was mythic in the same way that Hercules was, and in very much the same way that Iron Man's Tony Stark is today. (After all, Odysseus had something of a penchant for wine, women, and song; there is one piece in, if I recall properly, the Illiad when Odysseus finds his crew imprisoned by a beautiful woman. So he lives with her and drinks her wine and eats her food and has lots of sex with her for a year before he finally sets his crew free. That has Tony Stark written all over it.)
The mythic is important, one of the most important things to inspire when creating your hero. Superman always worked best when he was slightly inhuman, when he possessed an iron will and a clear sense of right and wrong. Superman was very much the sort of classic hero that we see discussed in the wonderful book Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, one of the great science fiction writers of our time. Inversely, Superman is at his poorest when mostly, he just Has Angst and is unsure of himself, and does nothing mythic.
We want to know that there is a man behind the curtain, but we just want Oz, great and terrible.
Moments of humanity are good and powerful things. Jesus was another mythic figure (I'm not saying he was a myth, I'm saying he was mythic, please put down the angry e-mail), but there were moments of weakness there. They were important because of how starkly they contrasted with the rest of his character. The moment when he drives the merchants out of the temple with a whip, or the moment when he is terrified in Gethsemane, praying that he won't have to do what he knew he did.
If, on the other hand, Jesus spent all of his time agonizing, then there's nothing special about Gethsemane. If he spends all of his time raging against merchants, then driving some out of a temple is nothing very special.
It's the same with most super-heroes. Captain America or Superman are good examples. So is Batman, so is Hal Jordan. Actually, I think most of the Silver Age and Golden Age of super heroes are good examples. Even someone like Captain America, who was human where Superman was not, still was inhuman in his beliefs and his iron will.
Spider-Man is an example where the humanity is more important than the mythic. With Captain America, this is a great and towering figure striding across a scene. With Spider-Man, he is at his best when you are very aware that there is a man behind the mask. With Spider-Man, he can be fighting Norman Osborne, and you can still know that when he's done, he may have to grab his camera and go to his job, to pay his bills. This is humanity and Spider-Man works powerfully because of it, but on completely different levels than someone like Superman works.
The X-Men are another example. They are fatally flawed individuals (who is more chronically messed up than Cyclops, after all?) And yet, in their greatest stories and most powerful moments, the X-Men too become something mythic and greater than mere humanity. When you get into the classic Chris Claremont/Steve Ditko storylines which gave us such stunning stories as The Phoenix Saga, even though the dialog is over the top (and RIFE with EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!) and even though the character motivations are clearly detailed in little bubbles, these are as mythic as Odysseus or Paris or Heracles standing on a battlefield and vaunting over their fallen enemies.
So if we treat Spider-Man as one extreme (Humanity) and we treat Captain America as another extreme (Mythic) then you can see where the importance is to not only toe the line between the two and be willing to cross over...but the most important thing is to be totally aware of it.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I re-read a number of comics from the Nineties, and while they were still showing hints and signs of the mythic qualities of yesteryear, they were beginning to experience one of the fatal problems that would really hurt comics as time went on (bankrupted companies, among other reasons).
They were embarrassed of themselves.
Superman works when he stands up tall and proud with his cape flapping in the wind and the American flag waving behind him, his chest out, his hands on his hips. He shouldn't be slightly hunched, because he's embarrassed about wearing tights and a bright red cape in public. Just a metaphor, but you see what I mean.
Comics were suddenly going "yeah, but..." and it hurt them. The Phoenix Saga wouldn't have worked, for example, without the vim and vigor and passion that was thrown into it. It was something of a ridiculous storyline, but it took itself seriously, and thus you are hard-pressed not to do likewise.
Comics, thankfully, are getting better at this. It doesn't hurt that we have writers like Joe Straczynski and Peter David and Joss Whedon working on comics. They know what they're doing.
Comics need to know where they stand. They are mythic, or they are human, and then they foray into the other side for great effect. Trying to muddle around in both -- either on purpose, or without realizing at all that that's what you're doing -- results in poor comics that lack momentum, passion, and characters you can really care about.
Super-Heroes are most assuredly a pantheon, just like the Greek gods were, just like the Roman gods were (though they evolved from the Greek pantheon) and especially like the Norse pantheon of gods. Any pantheon of gods and heroes and immortals and giants and great epic stories are the ancestors of the modern super-hero story.
It's worthwhile to remember that.
I've actually been stewing on this article for a good part of a month now, and I felt it made a good launching point for Boom Boom, a column that's going to come at you every Monday, for no apparent reason other than to help you speed up your countdown to the next episode of [insert favorite geeky show here.]
I don't think it's any huge spoiler if I say, at this point, that Captain America is dead. You have to be nearly living under a rock at this point to have missed out on that fact. Much like the death of Superman in the nineties (you remember the nineties, kids? Eddie Vedder? We wore plaid? Thought boy bands were the way to go) if you have missed out on the fact that Captain America is dead, then you probably didn't know who he was anyway, or are reading this blog.
I have been happily reading comics for most of my life now. Since I was a wee tot, whom nobody called wee tot, I've been reading all sorts of comics. I can still remember all sorts of storylines very vividly, because when you're young they have an effect on you, and it's an emotional one. You're not yet at that age where you're thinking Ah, smart publicity move on the part of DC to kill Superman, but of course we know he won't stay dead, I hope they don't screw up the return too badly. When you're young and you've got wide eyes and a big imagination, comic books fill you up. I still remember that Superman died, and I was a heartbroken young man, and then shortly thereafter Bane broke Batman's back (in the classic Knightfall series). I was one seriously messed up kid. These were my idols they were screwing with.
Batman recovered. Superman came back to life. It didn't lessen the emotional impact, and it didn't change how I had been made to feel. I've carried that with me a lot of years. Even now, I have the Death and Return of Superman in dusty, battered volumes on my shelves, and I can read them and still feel the emotions. They may just be old echoes, but I remember them.
It was just as big a deal when Hal Jordan stopped being the Green Lantern, when Wally West and Barry Allen (the Flashes) squared off.
Big deals, when you're young.
So, fast forward a bunch of years. I drifted away from comics during parts of the nineties. Recently, I came into a hundred and fifty comics from someone's collection, most of them comics from that weird period in the nineties when the Hulk was calm and cool and wore shirts (?), when someone thought X-Men: 2099 was a good idea (??) and when Superman had a mullet (!?). I re-read a lot of them and I remembered most of the stories, because while I'd been reading them, I hadn't been paying close attention. There was nothing to pay close attention to. The stories were outlandish and absolutely off the wall. Which I do fully expect from Super-Heroes (like Superman and Doomsday squaring off wasn't outlandish). I adore it, when done well. During the nineties, it was like the decline of hair metal. When something inflates too big, it either deflates slowly, or it pops. Either way, it goes down. Comics, and hair metal, popped.
Through all of this, I've read Captain America. Even when he really stunk (and sometimes, he really...really did). I liked Captain America. I thought he was the strongest (willed) character in the Marvel Universe. Comparable to Batman in the DC universe. In many ways, the antitheses of Batman. I followed him through his phases as U.S. Agent, and just Steve Rogers, and The Captain, all of it. I adored him. Throughout everything else that I faded reading, or stopped
reading, the comics I always stuck with were simple: 1) Captain America 2) Iron Man 3) Green Lantern.
I cannot imagine what the younger me would have felt, when reaching the end of the issue of Captain America where he's lying on the steps, bloody and listless. Steve Rogers, dead. I know what the older me felt, and there was definite emotion. I joked that it bothered me, and then gradually came to realize that actually, it really did bother me. After he died, I bought Marvel: Ultimate Alliance for the PS2, and have mostly just played as Captain America in all his various costumes. It made me sad. It really did. You can make fun of me for that if you want, but you're reading the blog on a sci-fi magazine web-site, and I bet you cried during the Ewok song in Return of the Jedi, so let's just respect our geekdoms, 'kay?
(An aside: I'm now finding it impossible to read things like The Initiative comics, where we follow Iron Man's new teams, and Iron Man himself. It's like reading how the Nazis won, and then we have to root for them. Iron Man is in danger, and I realize that I absolutely don't care. I really feel like the bad guys won.)
How it affected you, I will make no effort to guess. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it did. I can only talk about how it affected me. More importantly, why.
It's not that the writing was always great on Captain America (or on any comic; it's never consistently great). Sometimes, it was downright awful. The unique thing about ongoing series like Captain America, or any comic character, is that good or bad, you follow them from issue to issue, from month to month, from year to year, onward and onward. They never grow old, they die and are reborn, they fight, they are beaten, they get back up and fight again, and through it all, you read.
The ultimate power of comics is not always in powerful writing, although powerful writing understands this connection and magnifies it to great effect. The ultimate power of comics is that even if it's a bad storyline, you read and you care, because if you've been following the character for a year, six years, twenty years, you're as invested in him as you are in your family pet, or your favorite comic strip in the newspaper.
Every few years, they try to reboot comics, because they are ever aware of the oppressive history that bears down on them. They are afraid that new readers will not come into a storyline which has forty years of history behind it, and in many ways, they're right.
But in doing so, they fail to realize that their success still depends on appealing to the readers who have followed them for so long. Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men both worked (at first, never mind now) because we looked at a young and learning Peter Parker and we were, in many ways, nostalgic. Likewise, the X-Men. Eventually, the storylines gather their own weight and mostly we drift back to just reading what we read before. Whatever Spider-Man you happen to like.
History is the second most important component to a super-hero comic book. They (the creators) worry about the oppressive weight of a comic bearing down on the reader, without always realizing that it's history which garners the appeal. Some readers, myself included, like coming into something that has 5oo back issues. For one thing, it means if I am really stunned with what Joe Straczynski is doing on Spider-Man, I can go back and read my way through piles of back comics in between new issues. I can get lost in a world of Spider-Man. Sometimes silly, sometimes horrible, always Spider-Man, always the same world I willingly chose to immerse myself in.
It's the writer's biggest tool, and as I said, the second most important component in hero comic books.
For the first, I'll tell you about it next Monday.
Remember that flying car, the jet pack, your meal-in-a-pill that was promised since about 1950? Look around you and you'll notice a curious lack of these things in our everyday life. What then, will our future look like? What if we went out five or ten years and took a few furtive glances around? What would we see? Who the hell writes these kind of predictions anyway?
While you should take any prediction about the future with a grain of salt and I don't have a crystal ball to peer into, I do find myself in an interesting position to take a broad look at what may be coming down the pipe. See, I work with technology, I often write about technology and I love technology. I also have the luck to be employed at a place where the technology you'll be seeing five or ten years down the road is begin developed today. Medical applications, the Big 'N' (nanotech), computer innovations. I occasionally get a glance into where this is big, messy pile of technology is going. Want to take a peek with me?
Computers, my one true love in the tech world are going to become even more pervasive than they are now. On today's commute via the train I've seen a dozen laptops, at least fifteen blackberries and god alone knows how much personal tech like music players and other cell phones. What we'll be seeing over the next five to ten years is the Personal Area Network come to life. PAN will take the form of your phone, your computer, your music player, your GPS device, your video player and your SMS capabilities. This will all be rolled into two, perhaps three devices which will live. . . on you. With the ability to connect to the rest of the world as well.
Some folks have been touting the wearable computer as the future. Well it's about 40% here right now. When these devices start to converge and when we see flash memory based computers with very small, multiple core processors, with wireless technology getting not only smaller but consuming less power – each person will have their chance to become their own super computing WiFi hotspot.
Where will this lead? I'm going to predict that in ten years, not only will people be wandering around with multiple, powerful computers on their person, but they'll be working with the first Virtual/Reality integrating devices. That's a fancy way of saying glasses that integrate computer displays overlaying the real world. Which will also be hooked into your other multiple devices. Not virtual reality, not reality itself but a combination of the two.
Imagine reading your email, which is superimposed at 25% opacity over the real world. Imaging calling up your music library and being able to look through titles, covers and play lists without using your hands or holding a device (other than perched on your nose). Imagine getting directions via your GPS device and having them displayed in real time overlaying the roads you're currently driving on. Imagine never having to buy another monitor again.
Imagine the lawsuits! Our near future is going to be a very exciting time!
When you visit a web 2.0 site today, particularly a social or bookmarking site such, you're almost always given the opportunity to tag what you're looking at. Tags are simple, single or multiple word descriptions of a thing. It doesn't matter if that thing is a link to another website, a video, some artwork or a piece of software. If that thing exists on that site, you can tag it. Tagging makes your stuff easier to find and sort by you, and opens up your stuff for the whole world to sift through and take a gander at, based on the tags that you and others have assigned. That's the social part, right?
Now imagine tagging the real world. It will be like Google Maps but in the real world, in real time. You eat at a restaurant and the food is inexpensive and fantastic! As you're leaving, you glance back at the door, and tag the restaurant with “cheap, excellent food, wonderful service, 5 stars”. You can choose whether you want to keep these tags to yourself, open them up to a select group of friends or publish them for the whole world too see. You publish them for the world and 10 minutes later a couple from out of town wanders by looking for a place to eat. They see your tags and decide that this is the place for them as well.
It's such a simple thing but it will change our world drastically. Will you rely on a Zagat's guide again if you can see 17,423 personal tags for an individual eating establishment, and sift through them quickly to immediately display a 1-5 star result based on individuals who have eaten there in the past? Tagging stationary objects via GPS is easy. It's already being done. Tagging moving objects is next to impossible unless those objects are under constant surveillance or have a GPS locater on them. I'm sure GPS locaters are going to be built into these, not for a big brother sense, but for an ease of use sense.
Great, now people can tag other people! What if you yourself were tagged. What would my life be like if seventeen other people tagged me as an asshole? Or a good mark for pickpockets? What would law enforcement and the military do with this technology? The 'what ifs' are endless. One thing I can tell you is that when something like this does come along, it's going to change the way we think about everything. It's going to change the way business is done as well, which means a lot of resistance from large corporations and lots of startups that will fail.
This little bit of technology, along with the convergence of small, powerful parts into a piece of technology that's easy to use and easy to wear is going to change the way our society functions. That's a pretty big thing to say but I think it's true. Look at the world now and how data pertains to our lives in things like the Net. Now look back 25 years ago and see how different things were. You couldn't just hop online to see what movie was playing, use the Web as a dictionary or Google a soon-to-be boyfriend to see what they've been up to. Now take a change just as big, just as available and just as sweeping and move that ten years out. That could be what we're looking at. And all of the technology to do this is available in one form or another right now. A few more years of development, a few more advances in miniaturization and we'll be swimming in this stuff.
The problem used to be how to store and access all of this data. Now we've got larger capacity hard drives growing smaller every quarter. Multiple core computers are shrinking and using less power than their less powerful predecessors. Indexed databases make data searching easy. Our next problem isn't going to be on the computing end, it's going to be on how to sort and use all of this stuff!
And that, my friends and Internet acquaintances is what will help drive Artificial Intelligence one rather large step forward. If you're thinking “Glasses to AI...what?” then let me clarify. A big problem with AI is in how a computer can interact with the outside world. How do you get a computer to sort and prioritize the millions of data points that flow across our senses every second? Colors, sounds, shapes, touch, lighting, depth, tone – the list goes on. Turns out that all of that mushy grey stuff between our ears does that on a regular basis. We learn to tune out what's not immediately important and focus on what our brains assume is. That's big. That's what keeps all of us from drooling into our laps as we try and process an entire world of perceptions and data. If we can learn to work with this, which we'll have to once the technology described above becomes more pervasive, we'll be taking a big step towards computers that learn.
At the core of my being, this makes me happy. Happy to see not only new tech coming and new ways to think coming with it but to see all of my wonder at the fiction I've been reading since I was a kid coming to play in my life as real, tangible stuff. That is exciting. That makes me want to see what's going to happen ten years after our next leap!
This week I’m going to talk about two successful television shows- both remakes- and what their success means for the state of television as well as our culture in general. Now, I’m catching up on these shows via the magic of DVD, so I’m only on the second season of each. This greatly decreases my ability to deliver spoilers, and I’m going to do my best to avoid specifics when I can, so even if you’re only considering watching these programs, you should be safe.
We here at BBT Magazine wish you a safe and happy April Fool's Day.
I love you guys!
Here's a picture of Lucien working on BBT's submissions!
This is the fabled censorship post that I've said I'm going to be writing for ages and ages now. This is it. Honest.
In the news media, a very big deal is made out of the fact that video games are given ratings, are full of content which subliminally makes kids shoot up their schools, is horrible and evil, etc. Video games are the worst things ever to come along, they are the most dangerous thing to ever touch a child which is not a mountain lion, they are destroying civilization as we know it.
The bit about all that which is bullocks, of course, is that they said almost verbatim the exact same thing about that horrid rock 'n' roll stuff, or that Elvis Presley boy, or even the Beatles. These things are Destroying The World As We Know It.
(An aside: Interestingly enough, when they talk about rock or video games destroying "the world as we know it," we are never concerned that the part it's going to destroy are the bits full of war, genocide, or starvation. Mostly, we're scared it'll destroy the bake sales, church meets, and Sunday drives.)
Well, if you're reading this blog, then you probably know that rock 'n' roll somehow failed to destroy the world after it appeared. And maybe it's just being slow and clever about it, but so far, video games have failed to destroy the world, anymore than the day-at-a-time destruction that it's always going through.
Nevertheless, the news media goes after 'em, because that's the popular thing to do. My pregnant wife and I are playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, which is full of super-heroes hitting bad guys. So I suppose my son is going to grow up wearing stretchy pants, carrying a Captain America shield, and fighting bad guys.
I can live with that.
What I have more trouble living with is the big, ugly, stinking world of censorship that you really never hear about in the news, that you have to go to the very back of your newspaper to read about, that you have to dig around on the internet to discover.
Books. And Comic books.
Many people innately assume that books, and comic books, are dead and dying. This is simply because in our glass teat-centric world, if the television or the internet doesn't yap about it at some point, it must not exist, it must be dying. But to paraphrase the Bard, "there are more things in heaven and earth than the internet knows."
Books and comics are still censored something fierce. Not only is the war against censorship tougher and more bloody there, but it gets both less attention and support than it would if someone on CNN wasted thirty minutes droning about it. The fight is more dangerous, more unreasonable, more insane.
And in case you think I'm just trying to educate you...well...I am. But I'm also pointing you toward the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. And there are other important sites, like the First Amendment Group, or the Open Rights group, but I want to talk about CBLDF first and foremost here. It's most active on my mind.
Let's talk about Gordon Lee, as an example.
To take bits and pieces from Tom Spurgeon's wonderful site, where he discussed the matter (link withheld...for a moment...), here's what happened with Gordon Lee.
"Lee, of the comic shop Legends in Rome, Georgia, was charged with two crimes stemming from a downtown community event on Halloween night, 2004. A copy of Alternative Comics #2 was given to a nine-year-old. Alternative Comics #2 was the 2004 Free Comic Book Day from Jeff Mason's boutique comics company of the same name. It contained selections from various Alternative projects, including eight pages from cartoonist Nick Bertozzi's forthcoming work "The Salon." Three of those pages contained pictures of a naked Pablo Picasso acting in a non-sexual manner.
Lee was charged approximately one week after providing the child with the comic in question. The charges were "distributing material depicting nudity" and "distributing obscene material to a minor."
When people question the value of supporting Lee, the focus of their complaints seems to be on Lee's actions: that the retailer screwed up, he should have known better, he should have made certain this didn't happen, and his mistake makes it that much harder for everyone who does not make such mistakes to run their businesses"
Now this is the gist of it. Gordon Lee didn't know the exact content of a comic book he sold to someone.
I read a pretty fair amount of comic books every year. I usually read the Free Comic Book Day offerings (a sampler, of sorts, and certainly unrated, because it's a sampler). But if you asked me the content of Issue 4 of Civil War: Front Lines, I would probably fail to recall it properly. I bet, through the little used bookstore I work at, I've sold a romance novel to someone under 18.
Now, it's worth remembering (and Tom also points this out) that the danger isn't that as a retailer, he sold a comic with mature images in it to a kid (whom I doubt read the comic and didn't know what it was). No, the kicker is Gordon Lee is being charged criminally.
Criminal Charges. If he'd been giving kids Playboy issues in the park, maybe. But he wasn't.
(Another aside: Where the hell were the 9-year-old's parents? Seriously. Pay attention to your kid, chucklehead, watch how this problem doesn't happen).
Gordon's charges were eventually dealt out. Here's what he lives with:
1) His home is subject to random searches at any time, at any point, on any given day.
2) He is forbidden by the courts of law in this country to make art. Meaning if he draws, if he sketches, if he doodles on his telephone pad, he is breaking the terms of his release and can go to jail.
3) He is not allowed near children.
Fun, huh? You'd think he'd been tapping little Timmy in the back of a van. He wasn't. He was selling comic books.
The case of Gordon Lee v. the State of Georgia is still going on. And now, I'll give you the link to Tom talking about the case.
Here it is, from February, 2005
February. 2005. That's over two years ago. That's when the CBLDF picked it up and started making noise about it. All of this business actually happened in 2004.
Amazing how CNN has failed to accidentally mention it in all that time.
But the CBLDF noticed, and they're fighting.
...
So this is the bit where I plead.
The CBLDF is hardly making a tidy profit by sticking up for these people. Legal cases cost money, lots and lots and lots of money. And they need you to actually bring that money in.
So please, please, please go to CBLDF's Commercial Site
It's not like you're getting nothing for your donations (unless you just straight-up donate, of course). You can get a cool Frank Miller T-shirt. You can get a bucket of Will Eisner stuff, how much better can you get? Well, Jeff Smith stuff. Neil Gaiman perfume, and other stuff. Or you can just donate a lump change of money.
The CBLDF is doing something vitally important, because if they weren't, there wouldn't be anybody doing it. I take comfort in knowing that if I need them, they're there for me. Right now, I don't need them. But they need me.
And you.
Lucien: What is Fejogep?
Chris McFann: It is the single greatest story ever put to paper.
L: What made you want to take it on as a Graphic Novel?
CM: The fact that i have been drawing capes and spandex for so long that anything
without initials in the belt buckle is a big plus to me.
L: Tell us a little about your background.
CM: I have been doing odds and ends here and there for the past ten years or so.
Only recently has it gotten to the point that it has become more of a full time
thing for me.
L: Who are your influences as an artist?
CM: Mostly my friends... John Barnes, Sean Gengler and Clayton Crain.
L: How is it working with that Lucien Spelman? He's one of my favorite writers,
and I've heard really great things about him, are they true, or is he an asshole?
CM: Both are true.... he is a great asshole.
L: Whats the market for a one-shot like this, and how does marketing a single issue
graphic novel differ from traditional marketing?
CM: Its like having an only child, it's cheaper but you cant afford to screw this
one up cause it will be the one to take care of you when your old.
L: Do you see potential for a series if the issue does well?
CM: Hopefuly there isnt a series... we hope hollywood just plunks down a big ol' pot
of gold for the movie rights. Then we will just retire and work as consultants with
hot secretaries and go to fancy parties. It that doesn't pan out then a monthly gig
would work too.
L: What's in your pockets right now?
CM: Nothing... I'm in my underware laying in bed having Dragonspeak type this while
I watch really bad movies and try to finish this page before Lucien sends his goons
to work me over.
L: Does this Graphic Novel have anything to do with Kathy Sierra, Twitter, MySpace,
YouTube, Web 2.0, American Idol, Or Sanjaya?
CM: No, but at least you can use those in the tags now!
So, the other day, I realized that it had been far too long since I'd read any science fiction, and I thought this was extremely strange. I'm a tried and true science fiction fan. I grew up on the stuff, I cut my teeth writing the stuff (which is why you should write with your fingers, and not your teeth) and I deeply enjoy it.
Yet, I looked over my bookshelves, my TV shows, my movies, and I realized that Sci-Fi just wasn't on the list. Unless you count things like old Star Trek re-runs, Babylon 5 reruns, and maybe if you count Heroes. That's about it.
Very strange. I got to wondering why.
So I went back further, digging into the sci-fi books that I'd last bought, and trying to figure out why I'd drifted off-course, as it were. I realized that about around the time I discovered Neil Gaiman, I trifted into that type of fantasy and away from sci-fi.
I did figure out why, eventually, and this is why:
Science Fiction, to me, became like high fantasy (a la' Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, et al) which I also completely fail to get. That is to say, somewhere along the road, it became so complicated and so in-depth that I felt like I'd lost the plot and I, without meaning to, wandered off.
(This is probably just me, mind you; if you agree, good, otherwise just assume I'm blithering and move thee on.)
The science fiction books of Greg Bear and Kim Robinson, or the books of M. John Harrison for example completely fail to interest me. They're detailed and heavy and strongly science based. They are deep and involved and increasingly scientific. At least by me, it began to feel like I needed to do extra reading in order to follow the books, or needed to have had some really serious college education toward quantum physics before I could really enjoy the book.
Why is this? Truthfully, I'm not sure. I will still happily read Isaac Asimov, even though he spent a great deal of time talking about all manner of scientific detail. That said, as I think back on all the Asimov I've read in my life, I can recall Hari Seldon, the Mayors of the Foundation, Elijah Bailey, R. Daneel Olivaw, Gladys, and so on. All sorts of characters. I can vaugely recall the science of Hari Seldon and yet, as I tried to finish this sentence, I just realized I don't remember what it's called.
I guess the reason I drifted away from a lot of science fiction is that I'm very much in favor of people stories. All stories are people stories, but sometimes there are swaths of information piled on top, layering what can otherwise be a simple story into a thick and complicated tale. (Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want simple stories, mind you.)
So, of late, I've started writing some science fiction stories, and they have very little actual hard science in them, because I guess that's just me. I've started reading some sci-fi again, and it also doesn't have a lot of hard science. When it comes to books, I think I prefer space opera to hard science.
Realizing that, I realized that when I went to Barnes & Noble and specifically looked for sci-fi there was A) Less sci-fi than fantasy and B) Less people story-science fiction than hard science. More William Gibson than Robert A. Heinlein, to make a comparison.
I'm not saying the system's broken. They sell. People buy 'em, and read 'em. I think it's probably just me having one of those figuring-out-the-world moments.
So, er, to bring this around to a point...those of you out in the world who are writing urban fantasy novels? C'mon. Go write me some space opera. Put some people on some space ships and throw them out at weird angles in the universe, and see what happens.
And then tell me about it. Because I like me some people stories.
I'm an avid reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I also enjoy the occasional scientific text for those of us who aren't physicists or biologists. I'm also (to the surprise of many) not a big Star Trek fan.
And I have a bone to pick with certain SciFi television shows and movies and what they've done to the collective unconscious as far as alien life is concerned.
It seems that these various institutions consider aliens to be . . . pretty much just like you and I. The average badly imaged SciFi alien is just some guy with a thin coat of blue paint on and a few candy corns stuck in various places. They're typically motivated by extremely un-alien emotions, like jealousy, rage, greed or love.
I mean, these are aliens we're talking about, right? Isn't one of the very definitions of 'alien' to be unlike a human in just about every way? so why is it that aliens are constantly portrayed like futuristic Blue Meanies? One argument I get a lot is it's a problem with the budget.
Sure not everyone has a couple of million bucks to blow on spectacular CG effects. But when it comes right down to it, I think that's a pretty lame excuse.
Take an extremely alien, cold, almost unthinking killing machine that will stop at nothing to bring down the protagonists – not because it's evil, not because it's motivated by revenge, but because it's hungry. Doesn't that sound just a little alien to you? Now think about what this thing would look like. It can move fast, exists in an element that's toxic to humans yet that we insist on invading, and it's big. Four, five times the size of you or me easily. It's been spending millions of years evolving into a super predator. Think that would be a tough creature to make? A hard one to portray? Well Steven Spielberg did it with a few hundred pounds of leaky rubber in a little movie called Jaws.
Bruce (the shark in Jaws) has more alien qualities than most on-screen aliens I've ever met. And Spielberg did a well thought out, tense, well paced and suspenseful movie while barely showing Bruce to us at all! I think that does pretty well for the budget argument for lame aliens.
Perhaps another reason aliens are portrayed as so human is that it's really, really hard to think like something other than a human. Really. Give it a try. Think about what you're life would be as a giant, ambulatory hot dog. Or a scattering of energy across a million miles of void. That's not easy. It's doable with some heavy creative energy and a lot of work, but easy it's not.
Even scientists fall prey to this. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm watching some show on the Science channel and a scientist type comes on ans says “no life could possibly exist on a planet like this.”
When they say that no life could possibly exist on this planet, what they really mean is no Earth like life could exist there. They say nothing of a silicon based entity name Vrokkkth who subsists on radiation and completes a single thought in the span of a year.
What about sentient robots that have self evolved. I mean come on, I'm just one guy with a passion for neat things and no one is giving me a budget to produce massive SciFi films. Can't someone else think like this?
Or maybe they don't want to. The kinds of aliens that I'm talking about (both the human/alien and the alien/alien) abound in modern Science Fiction, so why not on the movie screen? Perhaps it's because the people in charge of making movies – by this I mean those who hold the purse strings, think that we the movie going public are just too dumb to want that.
If you're wondering why I don't put my money where my ingestation organ for mincing selbrium crystal is, well here goes.
Plot synopsis: Contact is made with an obviously alien object rapidly approaching stellar space. From what little communication is established we can see that the alien(s) is able to roughly communicate in Chinese. It's made known, not by any government but by ham radio enthusiasts that this messenger from the stars will land in the exact mid point of the Atlantic Ocean and will grant access to itself to anyone who can make it out there.
It stresses that any hostile action against it or anyone attempting to make it to the rendezvous site will result in strong repercussions.
The focus of the whole movie is how several different groups of people (A poor fisherman and his family from Cuba, several government agencies, the military from a major player like China, a telcom tycoon from Europe and Steve Ballmer, a group of missionaries) all work in their own ways to make sure they'll be at the spot the alien intelligence is going to land at.
The majority of the movie focuses on how society will have to deal, and deal rapidly with the changed knowledge that we are not alone in the Universe. What strife will there be? How will these vastly different groups from strong cultures cope with each other?
The alien(s)? The don't show up until the end of the movie, spending the most of the film as a slowly growing bright point of light in the Northern Hemisphere sky.
What is it? An ancient group of symbiotic intelligences that consist of a dead, vacuum worthy outer husk inside which is a super huge (several hundred miles across sphere) intelligent structure which keeps an ecosystem of non-intelligent and lesser intelligent creatures alive inside it for the purpose of keeping them all alive. Included among these beings are intelligent beings one order of magnitude more capable than humans who have been evolved to care for and keep alive the superstructure. These are also tasked with interfacing with any outside intelligences that the entire system may come across, under the direction of the more intelligent superstructure.
See? That wasn't so hard. You studio execs out there take note. I can have a script treatment ready any time and I'm willing to contract out as an advisor.
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biggest conceit of Star Trek—I mean, even Futurama didn’t go so far as to have ‘optional employment,’ and they had robots who run on booze and are far more fun to be around than any of you (except for that one who stabs people) – but I think the biggest problem with Star Trek is The Next Generation in toto. Because not only does the series fail to examine the lives of those not in Starfleet, it glosses over the lives anyone not serving aboard the Enterprise, and those guys are probably having way more exciting adventures than the Enterprise is. Allow me to explain:
