The author, his writings, and his warped little mind.
Just a quick update before bed. I have discovered that the blog Baryon Review reviewed Zero Gravity and had a sentence about my story “Leech Run”. The implication is that the reviewer enjoyed the story; he explicitly says he liked the book.
My brief con report for ChattaCon will be up tomorrow or Tuesday. I didn’t make any sales (that I know of), but I made some great contacts and new friends. Check back for more details.
Found another little blurb on a blog about Zero Gravity. One story seemed to get more word space than others. Guess whose. 😀
The stories that stood out for me were ‘Leech Run’ by Scott W Baker. Leeches are people that can suck the power from any source so are particularly dangerous on a spaceship. Although illegal to transport leeches anywhere Captain Titan is unscrupulous enough to do it at a high price. But of course things go wrong as one of the leeches escape from the hold. I liked the idea of ‘leeches’ as if they were a new kind of vampire and the mystery of how one could disappear from a sealed hold to reappear again was intriguing. There was a nice little twist at the end too.
The whole review can be found at Jacqueline Kirk’s blog.
Saw Iron Man 2 today. Not bad. Not great, but not bad.
Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke both put in excellent performances. Don Cheadle was fine, but he wasn’t given a whole lot to work with. It felt like his best lines were cut either out of the script or the film. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Pots was whiney and annoying. Scarlett Johansson’s character was unnecessary and gratuitous, and I say this from the perspective of someone who had a fair amount of gratitude. Sexy as hell, but a bit pointless. And her booty was enhanced…again, not that I’m complaining.
Other actors’ performances registered even lower on the Richter scale. Samuel L. Jackson felt like a cameo the whole way despite having at least twenty lines. Sam Rockwell (played Tony Stark’s competitor) was annoying and poorly written, being either competent or incompetent as the script required. Even minor roles (Happy Hogan and Agent Coulson) were cardboard and silly.
The acting simply lacked depth, no thanks to writing that offered depth only to a character or two. I wonder if there’s a director’s cut with a more complete story. Effects, at least, were as good as expected; not Avatar but good.
When the first Iron Man came out, I expected an explosion-packed roller coaster ride with some snarky comments and lots of cheese. What the film delivered was a complex if narcissistic hero in a well-developed story with poor acting y the villain (sorry, Jeff Bridges). So for the sequel, I expected a more complex story with more personalized character depth and some new toys that go boom.
More toys, check, though not much was made out of them. Complex story? Hah! Not even. On top of that, every opportunity to explore a character other than Tony Stark was promptly brushed aside in favor of more drunken antics from the protagonist. Somehow Rourke transcended this and delivered his darkly sinister Russian physicist with some complexity, mostly achieved through facial expression and silence.
So, was it worth it? I went to a matinee, so sure. It was better than Transformers 2, nowhere near Avatar or either recent Batman film, beat the pants off both Hulk films, dropped square in the middle of the Spiderman franchise (with better effects than the webslinger), and fell short of my appreciation for the GI Joe film (which I actually liked). Most importantly, it fell short of the first Iron Man. It was a typical summer-blockbuster-sequel-type film with a couple standout performances and a little eye candy (don’t forget the sexy US Marshal…who is Kate Mara?). Little more than that. But don’t expect too much and you’ll have a fun night at the movies.
The James Cameron film Avatar is getting some very mixed press right now. Some critics – from what I can tell, the best-known critics – have christened it just short of a masterpiece. Others have dubbed it the sci-fi 
equivalent of Dances with Wolves, aka, Dances with Smurfs. I’ve seen other variations, but that’s the idea. So which is it, a fantastic new world of CGI and brilliant storytelling or a tired old plot regifted in technicolor wrapping paper?
It’s both, but it’s mostly the former.
Face it, there is no new plot under the sun. Humans siding with aliens, especially in ways that bring attention to some political hot topic, has been a science fiction staple in literature for a while. It can be as small-scale an alien presence as ET or as large-scale as an interplanetary war (specific works escape me). People have gone so far as to accuse Cameron of plagiarizing Poul Anderson’s novel, Call Me Joe. I’ve not read the latter, but come on, how many people have thought up stories they thought were brilliantly original just to find out they are cliche. A vampire private detective? The aliens are really humans? Anything with a dwarf in it? plagiarism has to go deeper than a synopsis.
So what was good about Avatar? Of course the effects were outstanding, Lord of the Rings – calibur CGI. The environment was beautiful even if it did look a tough like Batman Forever in the jungle. The 3d was quite good but still distractingly like a pop-up book; I’d rather watch it flat. The aliens’ tribal culture was convincing. Yes, it reeked of Native American influence; every alien culture has to come from somewhere. The plot was solid if unoriginal.
Bottom line, it is the execution that makes the film brilliant, not its originality. It is feverishly predictable throughout, mostly through its own heavy-handed foreshadowing. So what? The pacing was great, not always the case in a 2 hour 4o minute movie.
I’m going out on a limb and calling Avatar the best sci-fi movie since The Matrix. I may have forgotten one or two contenders, but I’m pretty confident in my statement. It is possible to recycle things to make something better, especially when combined with something cutting edge. Avatar is a must see.
I recently finished reading The Rookie by best-selling horror writer Scott Sigler. I discovered the book through Mur Lafferty’s podcast I Should Be Writing. This was a significant departure for Sigler, not at all a horror story, and he self-published a limited edition. Mine is number 1122 out of 3000.
Like every writer that thinks he/she read a book before you did, I’m going to write a review.
In a future only a few hundred years away. football has become the intergalactic pass-time of all races. Teams are composed of players from all races, some fitting certain roles better than others (big races are linemen, fast races are receivers, humans get a lot of the multi-faceted roles). The book follows rookie quarterback phenom Quentin Barnes (QB the QB) through his journey from lowly Tier 3 ball to a Tier 2 team poised for a shot at Tier 1 (the system works similarly to Europe’s soccer leagues). Quentin battles his ignorance of and prejudices against the other races as he tries to earn a starting position and lead his team to the promised land.
To say that The Rookie has a formulaic story is to put things mildly. Young, arrogant talent comes to the big leagues and discovers he’s not half as good as he thinks he is, then tries to lead the team to victory. That’s only eighty percent of the sports movies ever made. But then, I was reading a sci-fi football book. What should I expect, War and Peace? The book delivers on its formula right up until the last game where I felt a bit let down. (I am resisting spoilers since there are two versions of the sports formula: victory and just-missed-but-we’re-better-for-the-run. This is one of those.) It wasn’t the result that disappointed me, rather the lack of suspense and mundane events that lead to that ending, specifically events that fail to hinge on the protagonist. You don’t expect Notre Dame’s success or failure to revolve around Rudy at the last second, but I did expect the Krakens’ to revolve around Quentin.
The alien races were nicely developed. I particularly liked the speedy Sklorno race that has made football into a religion and canonize exceptional athletes, especially quarterbacks. The Ki were intriguing but left too mysterious; I wanted Quentin to really connect with them. Maybe that was asking a bit much of a reluctant bigot like Quentin. The Quyth were probably the most developed and the least interesting, with an obvious caste system that dictated everything about their culture that wasn’t a criminal enterprise. And the ruling class of Creterakians was odd at best and distractingly trivial at worst. All that said, I was amused by the races and the story would fall apart without them.
I had a hard time sympathizing with Quentin in the middle third of the book. His thoughts were flawed in obvious ways, insisting people were trying to sabotage him when they were obviously trying to help him and getting way too tied up in his own ego. I like flawed characters, but it was very juvenile. But then, so was Quentin. The characterization goal was achieved without the subtlety I hoped for.
Other characters were considerably better sculpted, specifically Donald Pine, the veteran quarterback entering his decline. His flaws were integral to the plot, too, and their handling was similarly un-subtle — more abrupt than obvious. While on the subject of likable characters, Denver and Kill-O-Yowet were just starting to be interesting when the story veered away from them.
Now let’s discuss the book as a physical object. Very nice. The cover is very nice and the game program inside (with color art of the races, interviews, even advertisements) is awesome. It definitely helped to immerse me in the story and just made the ride more fun. The box scores and league updates after every game were neat, but they might have served better in the appendices with all the other excerts. Sigler’s autograph is nice. The one thing the book seemed to be missing was professional editing. Typos abounded, in some sections. one every other page. Breath instead of breathe, me instead of he, and on… Distracting but nothing I couldn’t work through. (It could be worse…someone could have omitted twenty-eight consecutive words.)
All in all, it was a pleasant book that I felt fit a Harry Potter-aged target audience (though Harry’s dilemmas were depicted more subtly). Simple, straight-forward plot with no major logical holes I noticed (other than the Krakens playing their first playoff game on the road). Most of the obstacles are predictable, as are the solutions (though not the juniper berries). Could it have been stronger? Sure. The Barnes-Pine conflict could have been less transparent early and Pine’s confession could certainly have used more pressure, and… It was a light read, but an enjoyable one.
The Rookie
Overall: B
I understand that Sigler offered The Rookie as a free podcast. I feel like I overpaid for the book, but it’s a collector’s item. Who knows, it may be worth money when someone makes a movie out of it. (It would translate to the screen well, animated or live actors mixed with CGI.)
-Oso
Been missing me? Wait, don’t answer that…I probably don’t want to know. But I have been absent due to school starting back up. I’m trying to hit stride but feel a step slow. It’s been a jerky start to the 2009-10 school year. I’ll get going soon and my postings will become semi-regular again.
I have much to talk about, so I’ll spread it over a few different posts. What to say first? I know…movies.
It has been a while since I watched two movies back to back and could call them both good films. For one of these films, the “experts” agree with me; the other, I seem to be in the minority.
Yesterday I saw DISTRICT 9. It was very good. But more than that, it was unique. It reminded me of something you might read in Analog or Asimov’s, the way the aliens were characterized as no more or less human than the humans while still very different. It was, on the surface, a dark action movie full of all the government greed (here the role of government played by a corporation) and bloodlust the cinema has taught us to expect. But that was the surface. This was a movie about people (some human, some not) interacting under extreme circumstances.
The leading actor did an excellent job that was not at all diminished by being utterly unknown. The CGI was superb to the level one would expect with the name Peter Jackson attached to it. Some of the science may have been a bit hinky, but who cares? It was a groundbreaking film that bridges a gap between SF film and literature. Still a lot of action, but a lot of story here, too. Go see it. Eat lots of popcorn. And you have my permission to laugh when people and/or parts of their bodies are turned to wet red mist. It is funny in a morbid way, so yuck it up.
The critics seem to agree with me on D-9. They rave about it almost as much as they panned the movie I watched on BluRay a few nights before. That’s right, I watched PUSH and I loved it.
Don’t get me wrong, PUSH is not the groundbreaking accomplishment that DISTRICT 9 is. In fact, PUSH is a fantasy film in sci-fi clothing. Not just because psionics have been so widely frowned upon in science fiction circles, but because a Mover, a Watcher, a Pusher, a Shadow, a Sniffer, and a Shifter teaming up to take down a bunch of Bleeders and a powerful government entity (Division) is not so different from a Human a Dwarf, an Elf, a Wizard. and some Hobbits teaming up to take down a bunch or Orcs and a dark empire. Fortunately, PUSH had a lot of what Tolkein brought to LotR, namely the sense that the story’s universe was much larger than the film could possibly encompass. I had the distinct feeling that the film was based in an RPG universe, but agin that did as much to heighten my enjoyment of the movie as to dampen it.
The main character’s story was rich and (mostly) believable. I’ve liked Chris Evans (lead actor) since I saw him in the first Fantastic Four movie. The guy has charisma and can become a character (maybe not in a Heath Ledger kind of way, but that may be asking too much). And Dakota Fanning was excellent in her role. No other actor managed to damage the performances of these two leads, though few added much either.
I do think the film suffered a bit in the editing room. Perhaps that was just my desire for a fuller picture of things. I was engulfed in the world the way I seldom am, more so than even watching DISTRICT 9. Was it art? No. Was it good SF? definitely.
I must confess to having a quirky appreciation for some odd movies. Consider the only three films I have owned on both VHS and DVD: Clerks, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Spawn. (Yes, that Spawn.) I’ll stand behind Clerks to the end. From Dusk Till Dawnstarts with damn good storytelling and characterization only to turn their world on its head (as an encounter with vampires probably would). And Spawn…even poor scrit, overacting, and silly special effects couldn’t stifle the cool images and some badass nostalgia.
Anyway, I suggest you see both DISTRICT 9 and PUSH and make your own judgements. Neither is flawless but both are entertaining. One will become a classic, the other a cult hit. We will surely see a DISTRICT 10 sometime soon. And PUSH 2? Its worldwide gross and productions cost seem to be about equal, so I have my doubts. Oh well.
Scott W. Baker .net 