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Star Trek: Nemesis, One Generation’s Final Frontier

Star Trek: Nemesis, One Generation’s Final Frontier

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NemesisposterLet it be known that I missed the release of Star Trek: Nemesis because, in 2002, I was busy shepherding the next generation of science fiction fans into this wondrous, weary world. Eleven years later, I finally have the time to rectify that deficiency.

If the initial appeal of Star Trek (the TV series) was interstellar adventure coupled with wear-it-on-your-sleeve humanism, the long term attraction has proven to be much like that of visiting extended family, the kind of affable clan where reunions are always a treat.  Even if the vehicle in question is a stinker (Star Trek: The Motion Picture et al), a certain pleasure remains simply in spending a few hours in the company of trusted, far-flung friends.

Sure enough, good company is the chief pleasure of the Next Generation’s final outing. Nemesis proves to be a convoluted, shadowy film that trots out any number of sci-fi standbys (baddies in stiff vinyl costumes, fearsome ships much larger than the Enterprise, and diplomatic missions fraught with duplicity and danger), but it’s not by any means a disaster. Gone are the bright scarlet and black uniforms of old; now that the crew has aged a bit, a more somber black-and-heather-blue attire holds sway. Perhaps this is metaphorical? More than a few of our old friends do seem to be feeling the miles. Two exceptions: newlyweds Deanna Troi and Will Riker both look better than ever. Actors Mirina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes are lucky people; age has brought out a rugged sturdiness to their familiar faces.

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The Uses of Ghosts

The Uses of Ghosts

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living-with-ghostsWhile Black Gate readers may (fairly) view me as a sword-and-sorcery writer, thanks to the Tales Of Gemen the Antiques Dealer, a good many of those who have stumbled across my fiction might (fairly) think of me as a horror writer. Since I never expected to fall into that particular category, I’ve been doing a good deal of soul-searching as to the value of what I’m up to – the value, as it were, of basing so much of my tale-spinning on the supernatural instead of, for example, “real life.”

Dare I take this moment to point out that an entirely different set of readers might quite reasonably think of me as a writer of literary fiction?  Yeah, I wear that hat, too.

This odd combination of multiple caps has led me to the following conclusion: ghosts are a tool in the writer’s toolbox, as specific as more established weaponry like setting, length, voice, and theme.

Without further ado, I offer my list of why Things That Go Bump In the Night have worth. I don’t expect this to be an exhaustive list, but I trust that I have made a good start. Perhaps you, gentle reader, will be inspired to add to the till?

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Unlikely Story: BG Interviews the Editors

Unlikely Story: BG Interviews the Editors

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Closed dooers slider2It’s been nearly three years since The Journal of Unlikely Entomology made its first appearance, and while this multi-legged publication focused initially on that fertile but narrow intersection of spec fic and bugs, the magazine has since branched out, changed its name, and adopted a rolling series of varied themes (the latest being the upcoming Journal of Unlikely Cryptography, now accepting submissions).

Unlikely Story pays pro rates for fiction, a rarity these days, and manages to make the stories they present look sharper than switchblades by moonlight.  Here’s my interview with editors A.C. Wise and Bernie Mojzes.

Unlikely Story has not only shortened its name, you’ve upped the pay rate. Nobody does both those things in one short span.  Have you gone quietly mad?

A.C.: That implies we weren’t mad to begin with… I mean, we started off publishing a magazine exclusively about bugs, how sane can we be?

Bernie: Indeed.

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Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-Off Vs. Homage

Pacific Rim and the Culture of Rip-Off Vs. Homage

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“This is not a rip-off, it’s an homage!”–Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) in The Dead Pool

Watching the special features on Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim this past weekend, I was struck by something the director said. Paraphrased, he told the design crew not to take any elements from previously-existing kaiju (such as Godzilla, Gamera and so forth), but to pay tribute to the spirit of those films. In other words, it’s a classic homage.

"And I would do anything for loooove...."
“And I would do anything for loooove….”

Now, bear with me on this. I’m a fan of Asian cinema, particularly the 80s and 90s classics such as The Bride with White Hair, Jet Li’s Once Upon a Time in China series, The Heroic Trio and its amazing sequel Executioners, and so forth.  I’m not obsessive about it — there’s a lot I haven’t seen — but I know the high points.

So when I see something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, I see exactly what the lnfluences are. Except in this case, they’re not homages: they’re recreations of some of the exact moments from the films that influenced them, only couched so that you (the general American audience who’s never seen them before) will think they’re Tarantino’s or Ang Lee’s original ideas.

That, my friends, is a rip-off.

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An Addendum on Tie-In Fiction

An Addendum on Tie-In Fiction

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I wanted to add a couple comments to John’s brief post about tie-ins. Much of the commentary revolved around Alan Dean Foster. He’s a favorite of mine and influenced my writing and career. He and King were the only two authors I took with me to college, and those battered collections are still on my shelves. I’ve corresponded with him over the years, but the only personal contact was when my wife and I shared a pizza with him at Archon (Stephanie did most of the talking, I was hopelessly tongue-tied at sharing pizza grease with a guy who wrote so many books I read to bits). I though I’d expand a little on him as well.

First, to get the curmudgeonly “back in my day” village elder/idiot stuff out of the way . . .

alien-alan-dean-fosterSome of the younger readers of Black Gate might have a hard time imagining how starved we were back then for more of our favorite SF movie worlds. These days, well before a major movie or game comes out, there is almost always a web presence filled with “Would You Like To Know More?” media goodness. But even for a big 20th Century Fox production like Alien, we didn’t have anything beyond a few brief TV spots, reviews, and the same press packet that went to every major paper in the country. If we wanted to know more about the movie’s world, rather than how Sigourney Weaver got along with the cat on-set, all we had to cling to were the tie-ins.

In this, we were very lucky to have a guy like Foster writing the tie-in. In most of his books, he filled in plot holes he spotted with a little business somewhere or other (like why putting the crew of the Nostromo in a single, relatively safe location and turning the rest of the ship into a vacuum wasn’t an option). He also liked to add some flavor to the movie universe, the Alien tie-in memorably begins with a description of the business of recording dreams for entertainment. Since he was usually working from a script, his tie-in also served as a form of “additional scenes” for those days before the advent of DVDs with bonus features. It was from Foster that I first experienced Ripley finding Dallas in the alien’s cocoon, with Brett turning into a facehugger egg next to him. It’s also the only place, even today I believe, where you can get the full scene of the crew getting lucky for a change and Parker almost blasting the damn thing out of an airlock. No need to tell you who sabotages that, I’m sure.

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Abbotsford: The House We’d All Like to Have

Abbotsford: The House We’d All Like to Have

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The study at Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford House in Scotland. Postcard by James Valentine & Co published 1878. Photograph probably by James Valentine, who died in 1879. From the online collection of the University of St Andrews
…it takes a while to realize that it reminds me of my study.

(This week, I’m at World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England. If you see me, please say hello – it’s my first convention in years!)

I feel so at home in this place, it takes a while to realize that it reminds me of my study.

320px-Abbotsford08
…is like my study, except it’s an entire house…

Weapons and armor roost on the walls, occult tomes jostle with classics and history books for shelf space, and History’s shrapnel — locks of hair, an ancient book, or a scrap of stone or pottery — remind us of a real and concrete past.

Yes, it’s like my study, except it’s an entire house…

Abbotsford House on the Tweed near Melrose, is the absolute archetype of a Fantasy writer’s perfect mansion, except that it was built by the grandfather of historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott, way back in the 19th century.

Sir Walter Scott is Scotland’s Robert E Howard. His Targe and Tartan yarns put Scotland on the 19th-century tourist map. If his text is past its sell-by date, his stories live on on the screen, big and small.

He was so famous in his day that both Blucher and Wellington were glad to meet up when he visited the field of Waterloo. When he fell ill, the government lent him a Royal Navy frigate so he could tour the Mediterranean. (Oh, and, Hail to the Chief? Guess who wrote the original verses?)

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Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

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original.0I missed nearly all the seminal pop culture of my youth. When in eighth grade Andy H. asked me which I liked better, AC/DC or Pink Floyd, I honestly couldn’t answer the question. I was also much too tongue-tied to ask Andy if he’d ever heard of Doctor Who, which I’m quite sure he had not.

Anyway. One of the major events that I missed was Planet Of the Apes. True, Planet is from 1968, and I was only born in ’67, but even so, kids at my school through at least my sixth grade year sported Planet Of the Apes lunch boxes, thermoses, backpacks, and t-shirts. Planet Of the Apes (whatever it was) was cool.

My hipper-than-I friends informed me that Planet regularly played in re-runs on TV, and of course there was the short-lived spin-off series made specifically for the telly (1974). How was it that I had missed all this? Simple: I was building dams in the tributary streams of the Olentangy River, using whatever was handy: stone knives and bearskins, that sort of thing. I knew better than to explain.

Now that I’m older than Methuselah, or at least rapidly catching him up, I figured it’s time to see precisely what I’d missed.

And you know what?

If it weren’t for the execrable presence of Charlton Heston, it’s not half bad.

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The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

The Weird of Oz Wishes You a Happily Horrifying Hallowe’en

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Don’t fear the Reaper. — Blue Oyster Cult

Fall 2013 062
Visitors to our house on Hallowe’en are greeted by a presence.

Oh, I’ve loved being spooked, terrified, creeped out since I was knee-high to a werewolf and not much bigger than Bigfoot’s foot.

Okay, sometimes I chickened out; it got too much for me.

I have a vague recollection of my Grandpa Yontz, who died when I was very young, taking me into one of those spookhouses somewhere along the side of the road. We got a few feet into the dark, narrow entry hall. Up ahead to our right, glowing heads hung suspended in air (recalling it decades later, and now being something of a scholar of spookhouses, I can exactly identify the effect: polystyrene mannequin heads, the kind used to display wigs, strung up on fishing line beneath an ultraviolet light). Even then, I knew they weren’t real, but that’s as far as I got. I just couldn’t bring myself to plunge further into that black unknown. I ignored my grandpa’s reassurances, pulled my hand away from his, and darted back for the entrance.

Within a year or two, a real horror visited us: my grandpa was snatched away in a traffic accident on a narrow road coming back from a camping trip on the Mogollon Rim. In the face of reality, pretend horrors aren’t so scary after all, and I never again turned away from a spookhouse or a scary movie.

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Scale: What Pre-Modern Battles Really Looked Like

Scale: What Pre-Modern Battles Really Looked Like

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Gladiator
More men please!

That battle scene from Gladiator?

More men, please! Where you see a line of Romans, imagine five. Ancient armies numbered in the tens of thousands.

Sure, a thousand be-weaponed extras on-screen makes your mind go “1…2…3… Lots.” But real battles were several orders of magnitude larger.

Waterloo French Cavalry
More cavalry please!

Remember the Rod Steiger Waterloo? More cavalry, please! That should be 9,000 sabres. When you measure it out, they should fill the space between the two farmsteads. The only reason the Allied Infantry didn’t turn tail and run was because Wellington had positioned them behind a ridge so that they couldn’t see the tsunami of horseflesh about to wash around their squares.

Take an earlier battle on the same scale; Chalons — Huns and “allies” versus some Romans and lots of Romanized barbarians who hated each other. Jordanes says Chalons left 150,000 men dead on the field. That has to be a wild overestimate. However, suppose he’s out by a factor of ten and the body count reflects 10% of the men fighting… that takes us back to one hundred and fifty thousand warriors jostling and yelling, say about 75,000 a side.

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Passive vs Active Heroes

Passive vs Active Heroes

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Ask any established actor, and s/he will always say something along the lines of, “it’s much more fun to play a villain than a hero.” It’s no wonder: villains tend to get the best lines (“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”), certainly their share of the trophy companions, have a higher standard of living, enjoy life more, and many go to their eventual demise laughing.

There’s another difference, though, that strikes at the very core of the hero/villain dynamic. The villains get to be pro-active. That means that traditional heroes are always re-acting.

It’s in the nature of heroes to simply sit around and wait to be needed. The most vivid example of that is in Batman Returns, when Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is shown sitting alone in the dark until the bat signal calls to his alter ego. Superman can’t act until Lex Luthor unveils his nefarious plan. Philip Marlowe has to wait for a client to walk in the door.

Just chillin' wit my batz waiting for yur signal.
Just chillin’ wit my batz waiting for yur signal.

And this goes against one of the great Rules of Writing, which is to never let your hero be passive. But it’s in the very nature of heroes to be passive, to wait until the villain makes a move, to respond to a threat. After all, how do you act like a hero pro-actively?

Well…ask Conan.

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