What the heck are comic books doing in a Science-Fiction and Fantasy Book List!!??
Youth meets wizard, goes on quest, discovers hidden powers and saves the world
Why Clancy Brown Rules
I think half of Banks' purpose in creating these ships was to have an excuse to name them...
Why Science Fiction Movies Suck These Days
Story length
What makes a good villain? (or, Why Darth Vader Kicks The Emperor's Butt)
Writers: why they are like a wino with a $1.19 outside a liquor store carrying Mad Dog
Why didn't anybody tell me he had one of those...things?
What the heck are comic books doing in a Science-Fiction and Fantasy Book List!!??Allright already! Stop with the shouting! I'll explain! Although comics as a medium have always had a general lack of respect, primarily because they are viewed as only being superhero books, I believe very strongly that this view is unfounded. To give the short, short version of my usual diatribe, comics are a medium that is neither book nor artwork, but instead combines elements of both to produce an entirely new form of conveying information. (For a more complete viewpoint, check out Scott McLeod's Understanding Comics .) With this in mind, comics should be judged on their relative merit, and should not be ignored because of their stereotype, any more than the science fiction or fantasy genres should be downplayed as not being great literature (as they often are), simply based on the subject alone. These few comic books, I believe (and my roomie will probably agree with me) belong on the list every bit as much as any of the other works we have included. If you enjoy those, I think you will probably enjoy these as well.
Youth meets wizard, goes on quest, discovers hidden powers and saves the worldWhy are so many books (and stories in general) formulaic? And have you thought often about how some of the best, the originals, break those formulas? Look at the Lord of the Rings. Unlike most fantasy heros, Tolkien's hero, Frodo, doesn't discover he has magical powers or great skill at war. In fact, he is so weak only the steadfastness of Samwise gets Frodo to the point where he can save the world. And then he cracks! He can't do it, and chooses to embrace the temptation of power for himself. Only the accident of Gollum's attack and fall save the world. Can you think of another fantasy series that ends like that? Or how about a movie - one of my all time favorites, Big Trouble in Little China. Here's a story where the hero, Jack Burton (far and away Kurt Russell's best role), knocks himself unconscious charging into battle, faces down the evil sorceror Lo-Pan with lipstick on his face, and then leaves at the end of the movie with this exchange:
Eddie: "Aren't you even gonna kiss her goodbye?"
Jack: (pause)..."Nah."
That is story telling. The characters come first, not the formula.
Why Clancy Brown RulesClancy Brown is, without a doubt, my favorite actor. What does this have to do with our Science Fiction page? Well, not a lot, except that he is in two of the coolest sci-fi flicks ever made (see below)(not Starship Troopers). Why am I telling you about all this? Well, why the heck not.
So, a whole slew of reasons why Clancy Brown rocks: he is in three of my favorite movies of all time (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in the 8th Dimension, Highlander, The Shawshank Redemption), he is pretty much the only redeeming quality of the movie adaptation of Starship Troopers ("Medic!"), he has an awesome "I see my cut has improved your" voice, I discovered recently he attended my alma mater - Northwestern University...
...and of course the most important reason Clancy Brown rules, he is an avid Science Fiction fan. Hey, I guess this did have something to do with the page after all...
I think half of Banks' purpose in creating these ships was to have an excuse to name them...Names. The names people give their characters can be so central to the story. (In the back of my mind I hear my 10th grade Lit teacher saying, in reference to The Red Badge of Courage, "His initials are J.C. Who else has those initials? How about Jesus Christ?") I can think of at least two good examples of the way in which names shape stories. One is The Gap Series by Stephen Donaldson. He talks about the character's names at the end of the first volume (The Real Story), where he describes the process by which the names came to him before the rest of the characters, or even the story. And the names do fit the characters - Morn Hyland, Angus Thermopyle, Nick Succorso.
Another example of great use of names is Iain Banks. Here I am thinking not so much of the people, but the ships. Here are some examples:
The General Offensive Unit Limiting Factor
The General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal (a ship 4 km tall, 53 km long, and 22 km wide)
The GSV Sleeper Service
The GSV The Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival
The Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time
The point is not that the names are clever or funny. The point is that Donaldson and Banks use their characters' names to convey something meaningful if not essential about the characters. The more I read, the more time I spend thinking about character names.
Why Science Fiction Movies Suck These DaysStargate. Independence Day. Godzilla. The word which comes most strongly to mind is schlock. These movies all have two major things in common - the presence of impressive special effects, and the total lack of anything else. No plot to speak of. Bad dialogue. The acting is occasionally good, but that appears to be mostly by accident. Although these three are the worst offenders that come to mind, there are plenty of other recent movies that fall in the same category. The Fifth Element was visually more impressive than any of these, but was still essentially just eye candy. You can make the argument that Starship Troopers was some kind of old war propaganda parody, but it still was essentially "Beverly Hills 90210 in Space With Big Bugs".
So what happened to the big guns? Alien. The Terminator. The Empire Strikes Back. And the mother of all great science fiction films, Blade Runner (the Director's Cut was just better - the original still puts most recent science fiction films to shame). Why were those movies so good, and yet recent ones have been so bad?
Well, most of the blame lies with us (and yes, I put myself there, too). We go to see the crappy movies, and go "ooh" and "ahh" at the special effects. We do it by the boatload, and Hollywood, running as it does by the almighty dollar, says "hey, they'll see whatever crap we put out as long as something morphs into something else somewhere in the middle". The big-budget science fiction film has become the standard, where the words "big-budget" outweigh everything else.
It is my hope that the tide is beginning to turn. Godzilla looks like it will probably be a box-office disappointment in spite of its very impressive effects. Deep Impact appears to have tanked quite nicely after its big opening. Maybe Hollywood will finally start to realize that the public isn't as stupid as they like to think. We actually like the occasional good movie. Why did "Batman Whatever" do so poorly? Maybe it wasn't, as the folks who write this crap like to say, "because the Batman franchise is losing its steam", but is, instead, because it was one of the worst movies of the decade! Even the masses have their standards, and with any luck they are going up instead of down now that the post-Terminator 2 and post-Jurassic Park fascination with mind-bending computer generated effects is starting to fade.
Here's hoping that George Lucas, in many ways the father of all this, both good and bad, remembers his statement that special effects must always be added on to a great story, and should never take the place of the story. Here's hoping that Episode One is the next Star Wars (or even better, the next Empire Strikes Back), and not the latest Stargate.
Story lengthThe novel is the predominant length of story today, I think. But think for a moment about the variety of stories you've seen. One of my favorite Isaac Asimov stories is 2 pages long. And Bujold's Vorkosigan saga is now 9 novels or something, and yet superb. And garbage can be both short (any number of lousy short stories; fill in one from your own experience) or long (Robert Jordan; need I say more?). The only thing that matters is getting the right length for your story, and usually it is popularity that leads to problems. Witness David Eddings or Terry Brooks: both took a good story and kept adding work of lower and lower quality. Of course the master of this is Piers Anthony - no one can ruin a series by adding more to it as quickly as he.
This happens to short stories too. The abomination that is the novelization (usually a word signalling crap) of the classic short story "Nightfall" is the best example of this. Of course sometimes expanding a short story works, as Ender's Game shows. But usually the idea has found appropriate expression in the original, and more equals worse.
The prevalence of trilogies or longer in fantasy is another issue. Not every fantasy story needs to be 3 (or more) volumes to be a serious epic. Look at the original Sword of Shannara, which is top notch fantasy and just one volume. The story needen't cover all history since the dawn of time either. The work of David Eddings to flesh out his world (through an extra 5 volumes, then Belgarath the Sorceror and Polgara the Sorceress) has led to taking historical elements which lent an air of mystery and depth and turning them into explicit events to fit some new story or character need. What's left is a world that seems stretched and empty, with every story told despite the thousands of years covered. Contrast to Tolkien, who wrote thousands of pages of background, in such a way that even when you've read every word you are convinced there are still many unturned stones and musty corners to fire the imagination.
Getting back to short fiction, I think many people have a hard time finding fiction shorter than a novel. Longer is easy to publish (just issue multiple books) and find (they are all together on the bookstore shelf). But short fiction is usually published in magazines or obscure collections, and hard to find. So you can read the Dozois collection, and pick up random anthologies, but the quality is often uneven and the subject is random. However, I think many of the best stories I've ever read have been short fiction, and I think it is too easy to forget it is out there. Believe me, you'll waste much more time on Robert Jordan, and when you stumble across a "Nightfall" or "The Mountains of Mourning" or "The Bully and the Beast" all the mediocre stories will have been worth it.
What makes a good villain? (or, Why Darth Vader Kicks The Emperor's Butt)Nothing frustrates me more than a boring antagonist. The saying that you can only be judged by the caliber of your enemies is particularly true of fiction - indeed, one of the most interesting ways of figuring out your hero is to get an understanding of the villain so you know what the hero is fighting against.
The best villains, in my opinion, are as well developed and interesting as their protagonist. In the best cases the villain is someone to whom the reader becomes sympathetic. Villains who are insane or pure evil can be entertaining in their place and even frightening, but they aren't really interesting,and often come off as less frightening than the villain who you, in some sense, understand and feel for.
A couple of examples. On the subject of Star Wars (DO YOU REALIZE EPISODE I IS LESS THAN THREE MONTHS AWAY!??!), who do you find more interesting, Darth Vader or The Emperor? No one I have ever asked this question has answered The Emperor. Vader is such an interesting character - in many ways more so than any of the good guys (with the exception of Yoda, of course. Kicks major patootie, Yoda does, mmmm...). Through New Hope and the first part of Empire, he is this mysterious dark figure, obviously not in charge of things, but nonetheless everyone is afraid of him (primarily because he has a penchant for choking his subordinates to death. As Rob says, the worst thing that can happen to you in the Imperial Navy is to be promoted), and he is revealed from the beginning to have complex ties to the other main characters. Then in Empire, the whammy is dropped - the father of Luke Skywalker! I'll never forget leaving Empire at the ripe age of seven and debating with my friends whether he was lying or not. Finally in Jedi, we see him as he is - the fallen, deeply flawed, and evil character, but one who can still ultimately choose the light over the dark, and to sacrifice his own life for a son he has never known.
The Emperor is just some yellow guy who shoots electricity out of his hands. Whoop-te-do.
The point here is that because Vader is so well developed and is more than just "the bad guy", he becomes a truly great villain. He is interesting, he is mysterious, he has as much (or more) personality as any of the other major characters - let's face it, in many ways it is Darth Vader that makes Star Wars as cool as it is.
Now that isn't to say that all great villains have to follow this mold. There are great villains who are not sympathetic at all - Hans Gruber from Die Hard comes to mind. He was basically a homocidal jerk - but he was an interesting homocidal jerk. Compare and contrast him with the bad guy from Bad Boys (the new one, with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence) - what was that guy's name again? I rest my case. He was a nameless, faceless, Hans Gruber wannabe. Which is part of the reason that Bad Boys is a good film, and Die Hard is a great film. (It also helps that Alan Rickman is just flat out cool - where did he go, anyway? I want to see him in more stuff.)
Raven. Dr. Doom. Brandin. Mohammed Vance. Darth Vader. These are villains that we can truly look at and say "you know, this guy just might be cooler than the hero." These are villains who have depth, who are not just cardboard cutouts with a target on their chest. They are the kind of villains whose darkness give shadow and form to the light of the hero they face.
Hmm. Looking back on the statement at the start of this rant, I need to go out and make some better enemies, I guess. Somehow Ameritech, insurance companies, and the guy who cut me off in traffic yesterday don't seem to be quite interesting enough.
Writers: why they are like a wino with a $1.19 outside a liquor store carrying Mad Dog
The sci-fi / fantasy landscape is littered with writers who can not leave a good story alone. Frank Herbert. Terry Brooks. The all-time champion: Piers Anthony. An now we can add Orson Scott Card (with Lois Bujold pushing the fringes). These writers are all guilty of writing a good book, maybe even two good books, then continuing a "series" until the last vestiges of quality have been drained from it. Why do they do this? The cynical answer is sequels sell. I am as guilty as the next person of perpetuating this. A more generous thoery may be that the authors grow attached to their characters and worlds, and want to continue to explore and develop them. The author's privilege of exploring their world appears to be (roughly) in direct inerse proportion to the quality of the book.
Orson Scott Card appears to embody both of these theories. He states that he began Xenocide because of a contractual obligation to produce a third Ender book, i.e. he did it for the money. In the introduction to Ender's Shadow he describes how he got started on the book because he revisted the world and wanted to develop some of the characters other than Ender (which raises in my mind the horrifying spectre of books based on Alai, Petra, Bonzo, Ender's pre-school teacher...). The key to remember is this: whether he did it for the money or artistic integrity, the books sucked.
The astute among you are probably thinking to yourselves "Sven, you idiot, he wrote Speaker For The Dead for the same reasons and you liked that". True. This leads me to want to cut Card some slack for Xenocide. But three books which suck are not accidents. Look at some of the other series as well. Dune produced one good book. Shannara produced two + one cool character. Xanath produced about three. Surely these authors could have spent their time writing something good and creative rather than milking a sure seller. And if they are just in it for the money, then market discipline is the solution - I buy few sequels anymore and I encourage you to exercise extreme caution before buying a sequel. For those of you who still aren't convinced, just recall the consequences of buying Robert Jordan books.
Why didn't anybody tell me he had one of those...things?This rant is less of a rant, and more of an homage to one of the things we all love about Science Fiction and Fantasy books - gadgets! Toys! All those great technological and magical doohickys, thingies and whudgimadoozers that make us all stop and go "COOL!!". While we are all admittedly looking for the great stories, there is something to be said for those books/movies that first present us with some spectacular piece of hardware that makes us all revise the birthday present lists we've been keeping all our lives, possibly moving that Aliens pulse rifle down one or two notches for that nifty Singularity Grenade, or spending hours debating the merits of the Millenium Falcon versus the Enterprise versus the Defiant versus the Prince Serg versus...well, you get the idea.
Just think of all the cool stuff that we've collected in our heads over the years of reading science fiction and going to the movies: lightsabers, weirding modules, Glamdring, Reason, Elfstones, Felix's scout armor, a deck, the armor of a dragon lord, the Enterprise, liquid metal, pulse rifles, tricorders, blasters, a Glaive, R2-D2, the Yamato...
Good writing and good storytelling is, of course, what ultimately separates the coolest gadgets from just being another toy. Plenty of fantasy books have been written with lots of cool magical items, but as neat as the Orb of Aldur is, with all its power it will never be quite as cool as the One Ring. Few robots have had quite the charm and flair of R. Daneel Olivaw, and I would be hard pressed to come up with any sort of artillery-type device that would outdo a singularity grenade. And of course you would be hard pressed to come up with a better line to introduce a gun than "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."
Of course, it isn't a requirement that great speculative fiction present us with cool toys - two of the best sci-fi books in existence, Ender's Game and Speaker For the Dead, feature basically no gadgets of consequence that haven't appeared in some form somewhere else - and cool gadgets certainly can't save a fundamentally bad book or film. But we'll keep adding them to our list of birthday presents, won't we?
(By the way, for those of you wondering what to get me this year, my first choice has been "a lightsaber and the ability to use the force" since I was four, but I would gladly accept a Voidhawk and affinity in a pinch...)
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