Just The Caffeine Talking

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 4)

Well, it's done. I beefed it up by nearly a third and sent it out to my agent. I hope it finds a home.

One thing which expanding Corsair has allowed me to do is to give the minor characters more spotlight time. One of them -- Anne Rogers -- got promoted from a secondary role to one of the three leads. She gets to serve as the moral center of the story, calling out both David and Elizabeth when they're being too amoral or ruthless.

We also get to see more of FBI Agent Yu, and the sinister Colonel Ghavami.

But the real treat was that I got to weave in an entirely new character. I realized that David needed a foil, so I created Halfdan. He has all of David's flaws cranked up past 11: he's even crazier, even more solipsistic, and even more amoral. I liked (or enjoyed loathing) Halfdan so much I made sure to have him survive in case I want to revisit these characters again.

I already have some ideas along those lines, and the real world has conveniently handed me Planetary Resources and their asteroid-mining scheme, so that it doesn't require nearly as much handwaving as I thought it might to justify space commerce and piracy less than a generation from now.  

The next progress report on Corsair will be the pop of a cork if it sells, or sullen silence if it doesn't. We shall see.

Movies I Want (Part 1)

Science fiction has won the battle. Until the 1980s, big-budget science fiction films were few and far between. Now SF movies make up a significant fraction of the movies released by Hollywood. It's a safe, dependable genre, like romantic comedies or thrillers. Legions of effects creators, makeup artists, and prop builders can earn steady incomes working on science fiction movies.

We won.

Except . . . that we didn't. Because as I'm sure anyone who has ever listened to a science fiction fan ranting about the latest Hollywood blockbuster is aware, movies are doing a great job of doing science fiction badly. For every Blade Runner we get a dozen Spacehunters. For every Wrath of Khan we get . . . well, all the other Star Trek feature films. 

And yet, and yet . . . I do not abandon hope. Because there has been an encouraging trend visible in superhero films which could well creep over into their science fiction siblings. That trend is "respect for the source material." It's not widespread; not yet. But the huge success of The Avengers and other Marvel Studios films may finally get the message to studio bosses: you make lots of money if you make movies that respect and make use of the source material.

Eventually, someone's going to apply that lesson to science fiction. They're going to notice that there's a huge backlog of entertaining and innovative science fiction novels out there, and that decent adaptations of them would make extremely effective motion pictures. They'll make good SF movies -- imagine that, for a moment!

So: what books would make the best movies? Some of the classics of the genre might not actually work as well as one might think. Sure, we'd all love to see Stranger in a Strange Land on the big screen . . . except that it would mostly consist of naked people having conversations about the nature of reality. Not boffo box office. 

Anyway, here's the first five. Readers are encouraged to add their own.

• One of Poul Anderson's stories of Dominic Flandry. Not sure which one, possibly A Stone In Heaven. The elevator pitch should be an easy sell: "He's James Bond in the Star Wars universe." It's not quite accurate, but close enough. One could do it as a fun romp in the Star Wars vein, or amp up the Spenglerian gloom of Flandry fighting to preserve an Empire that's already well on the way to falling.

• A Life for the Stars, by James Blish. Obscure nowadays, and undeservedly so. The visuals of New York City flying around the Galaxy inside its force-field bubble alone should sell the movie, and as a bonus there's actually a pretty good coming-of-age plotline and some vivid characters. It might be more entertaining to combine the main antagonists (the city of Scranton) with the more baroque "Interstellar Master Traders" of Earthman Come Home. 

• Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke. Just film the book; it'll be fine. Do it in 3D IMAX format and nobody will mind that there's none of that character development stuff in it. I understand this one has been "in development" for years, so there's hope. Hell, it only took John Carter a century to go from novel to motion picture. Rama could probably get to the screen by the mid-2020s.

• To Your Scattered Bodies Go, by Philip Jose Farmer. The first book of the Riverworld series, in which every human who ever lived is reborn along the banks of a river which winds across the surface of an alien world. For the movie, I'd kit-bash it together with The Fabulous Riverboat, but that's because I kind of like Mark Twain better than I like Sir Richard Burton. (I've just discovered that the SyFy Channel did this as a TV movie in the hope it would lead to a series. Apparently not.)

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. Unlike his earlier work, it hasn't gotten dated, unlike his later work it's not too self-referential. The story itself is strong and simple: a revolution on the Moon. I've seen a proposed screenplay for this one floating around on the Web; one version is linked here.

That's the first five; more will follow when I think of them. 

A Message To Rock Musicians Everywhere

I have a particular handicap: I listen to song lyrics. Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not one of those people who thinks long and hard about the profound and secret meaning of song lyrics. (No, Charles, I don't think that's what "Helter Skelter" is supposed to be about.) But I do pay attention to them. 

Among other things, this means I find songs with grammatical errors almost painful to listen to. I don't mind a little colorful down-home "ain't no" or "don't got none" (even when it's written and performed by a Cambridge grad). But Jim Morrison ending a line ". . . for you and I" makes his song "Touch Me" grate on my ears every time I hear it.

But over the past few years I have discovered another trope in pop song lyrics which is almost as bad. I refer to the micro-sub-genre of rock singers writing rock songs about how hard it is to be a rock singer. 

There are surprisingly many examples of this, from the self-parody of Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," to the fairly good-natured "Stay" by Jackson Browne. But for sheer solipsistic whining I don't think any pop song can approach Bob Seger's "Turn the Page." Seems like everybody with a guitar and a contract has to do one number about how hard his life is.

I can't think of any other creative endeavor with so many examples of blazing self-pity on the part of the creators. Playwrights don't write plays about how hard their lives are, moviemakers make pictures about how shallow and conceited moviemakers are, but they don't complain about the work itself. (Even science fiction writers are more inclined to depict ourselves as goof-offs or eccentrics than as victims.)

It's particularly weird because rock stars are about the most glamorous thing out there right now. They're our society's Dionysian avatars. They get worship, they are free to indulge in all excess, and they are tacitly held exempt from the normal standards of behavior. Which means that complaining about it is like bitching because your gold bars aren't shiny enough.

A bit of unsolicited advice for all you rockers out there: stop it. Don't write any more songs about how rough it is being a rock music star.

Because if being a rock musician is such an ordeal there's a really simple way to solve your problem: get a real job. Become a roofer, or a farmer, or an oilfield roughneck, or a chicken processor. Then you can complain. But doing something millions of others dream about -- and then whining about how hard it is -- makes you look like a bunch of jerks.

Oh, and learn some goddamned grammar!

Top Three Cartoon Moments

I've been a fan of the classic Warner Brothers Looney Toons cartoons since I was about six years old, sitting in front of the old black and white television on Saturday mornings. There are plenty of people who have compiled lists of the greatest cartoons, but this is a little different. This is my three single favorite moments from Warner cartoons. The toons in question may not be the best (for instance, the immortal Duck! Rabbit Duck! and Duck Amuck aren't here) but these three moments can make me chuckle every time I think of them.

In canonical "list of things on the Internet" fashion I'm going in reverse order.

3.  Zoom and Bored (1957) -- The eleventh Coyote vs. Roadrunner cartoon. After various failed attempts, the camera slowly pans up an enormous makeshift ramp spiraling down around a crag, finally discovering the coyote waiting at the top with a round bomb, ready to roll it down at the passing Roadrunner. He lights the fuse . . . and the bomb instantly explodes. 

2.  The Ducksters (1950) -- Daffy is a sadistic radio quiz show host, Porky is the hapless contestant. Daffy asks a musical question, playing a single note and asking Porky to identify what opera it's from. Porky stammers out "Cavalliera Rusticana." Daffy turns to the (unseen) studio audience, and with one voice they roar out "Rigoletto!" 

1.  High Diving Hare (1948) -- Yosemite Sam is determined to see his favorite vaudeville high-diving act, and when the performer fails to show up Sam tries to force Bugs to do the stunt at pistol-point. The cartoon consists of Bugs continually tricking Sam into falling off the high-dive platform. Best moment: after various gags, we see Sam chase Bugs up the ladder once again. There's a beat while we see nothing but the ladder, then Sam goes plummeting down. Something about the purity of this moment makes it my favorite cartoon gag of all time.

Iron Man 3

I don't want to get into the habit of acting like a poor man's Roger Ebert and reviewing every movie I see. I'm not a moviemaker, I'm not a particularly representative moviegoer, and my eyes start to glaze over when I see the word "cinema." 

But I do want to talk a little about Iron Man 3, which I saw along with the Crack Team this past weekend. Short review: it delivered what we paid for. Fun was had. Now I'm going to talk about why. (Because it opened just a few days ago, I'm going to be vague about particular plot elements.)

Any kind of serial medium, like comic books, television series, and (increasingly) novel or film series, has a problem. The audience falls in love with the first episode, and wants more of the same. However, the audience also wants variety, and will get cross if you don't give them something new. At times that second desire gets forgotten.

I can remember very vividly my emotions as a teenager when I saw the opening title crawl for the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi. Back in those days we didn't have illegal YouTube downloads and leaked scripts -- to find out what a movie was about you pretty much had to go to the theater and watch it. As a Star Wars fan I was tremendously excited about how the epic story would wind up. I loved the original Star Wars, and Empire Strikes Back had managed the amazing feat of being even better. What wonders would this new movie hold?

And then, there in the text crawl, I saw that the bad guys were . . . building a new Death Star. Even bigger and more powerful. And I felt the first pang of that disappointment which gradually became my predominant emotion in movie theaters as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s. 

That's it? We already saw Luke defeat the Death Star, back when he was a snot-nosed kid fresh off the farm. I'm supposed to be afraid that he won't be able to do it again, now that he's a big-deal hero? Is that all?

Iron Man 3, I'm pleased to say, avoids that. The villain isn't a retread. The bad guys are genuinely intimidating. The villain's master plan, while typical comic-book lunacy, isn't stupid comic-book lunacy. The stakes are raised, but not absurdly. (Spoiler: I was kind of relieved to see that for once neither New York nor the planet Earth are in danger of being destroyed.)

And most importantly, the movie doesn't diminish its hero. It deprives him of all his mighty toys, but lets him remain heroic and resourceful, so that when he finally does triumph, it feels earned. By making us care about and sympathize with him, the story keeps us involved without artificially hyping up suspense.

I enjoyed it, the Crack Team enjoyed it, and at no point did I feel as though the people making the film thought I'm a moron. That's worth at least matinee prices.

  

 

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 3)

In my previous posts about Corsair, I mentioned that I have to expand my first draft to make it a proper book-sized book. Doing that revealed a structural problem. The original short story "The Barbary Shore" had extensive flashback sections, since it was simultaneously about Captain Santiago of Orbital Command battling Captain Black the Space Pirate and about the failed romance years earlier between Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz at M.I.T.

The structural problem was that while the short story divided neatly into the main action and the flashbacks, the novel didn't. There's a lot more stuff going on in the "present time" of the novel, while the amount of "back then" flashback material remains about the same. As a result, I had a story with a handful of flashback scenes scattered through the first few chapters, then no more. That felt clumsy.

So I decided on major surgery. I bundled all the flashback sections into a single chapter. So now the book's first chapter takes place "last year" when Elizabeth and David slug it out in space, then there's a chapter taking place "long ago" when they had their failed romance, and then the rest of the book is a straightforward chronological narrative.

I think the new organization will let me get away with using narrative scene-setting to tell when things are happening, until the actual launch of the pirate spaceship -- at which point I can put a little "mission clock" header at the start of each scene to make it clear that things are happening very fast for the rest of the book. 

Battleship (Part 3): Aliens

I write science fiction. A lot of my stories have alien beings in them. I like to think I'm pretty good at creating aliens and alien civilizations.

Which is why I am developing an irresistible urge to drive out to California and shout at every screenwriter who has used aliens in a film during the past couple of decades. For some reason, aliens in cinema have become the all-purpose excuse for lazy writing and slapdash plots. 

The failings of movie aliens fall into two main categories: motives and methods. Nearly every cinematic alien in recent years has completely nonsensical motives for doing what they do.

Battleship is actually one of the least bad offenders in this particular respect. The bad guys at least have a comprehensible motive: they apparently want to conquer the Earth. And they seem to be at least moderately suited for living on our planet -- they're nocturnal, but the Sun is down as often as it's up, and they appear to be amphibious.

Contrast the aliens in Signs, who turn out to be harmed by contact with water, which sucks for them because Earth is covered with water and its living things are basically made of the stuff. Why the hell would they want to come here?

Or the aliens in the otherwise enjoyable Cowboys and Aliens, who are on Earth to mine gold. Even the characters in the movie find this motive ridiculous when it's explained to them. When fictional characters start critiquing your writing, you should go back and revise what you've done.  

Or, stupidest of all, the bad guys in Battle: Los Angeles, who are here to steal our water. This is a howler which would have been barely excusable in 1961, but in 2011 we know that water is common in the Universe, and it would take about five minutes with Google for a screenwriter to find out that fact.

I'm not saying movie aliens should act just like humans. In fact, I'd love to see a movie alien with genuinely alien motivations. But alien motivations aren't the same as stupid motivations. The extraterrestrial big-game hunter in the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger action picture Predator was a fine example: it was here to hunt humans. It's weird, but it's not stupid.

And when they're not invading Earth for stupid reasons, the aliens seem to do it in stupid ways. I know why this happens: screenwriters have to build up the aliens as a big, powerful, scary threat, but they also have to build in an Achilles Heel to enable the humans to ultimately defeat them. Unfortunately, they tend to do this by making the aliens do blatantly stupid things, and then justify it by saying "Hey, they're aliens!" 

In the case of methods, the bad guys from Battleship are among the worst I've seen. They're totally inconsistent and, frankly, stupid. In personal combat they insist on attacking people with knives, like a pack of Assyrian soldiers from Sennacherib's army. A company of longbowmen could handle them pretty roughly. In naval enagements they are completely innocent of air power or gunnery, but insist on attacking by lobbing some kind of giant robot buzz-saws at things. (Said buzz-saws can chew through warship hulls at the speed of a running sailor, but can apparently be blasted into harmless puffs of vapor by a few rounds from an airplane's cannon.)

Most startling, they are capable of surrounding the entire state of Hawaii in an impenetrable forcefield dome, but don't bother using any similar protection on their spaceship gunboat things. At one point the heroes shoot out a window on the spaceship with rifles!

Everything they do is determined by what the moviemakers thought would look cool and scary, rather than what would actually be effective. The audience is apparently supposed to be so dumb we think a giant buzzsaw is a more deadly weapon than a dinky little cruise missile.

There's one other complaint I have about cinematic aliens: their appearance. For sixty years now, visitors from other worlds in movies have been humanoids. Two legs, two arms, a head on top, proably two eyes with a mouth underneath them.

People, in other words. People who wear funny clothes and may have funny rubber prosthetic appliances on their foreheads. 

Why? In written fiction, H.G. Wells had blobby tentacled Martians driving big tripods invading south England in 1898! We've had freaky weird-shaped aliens for more than a century in science fiction novels and stories, but cinema clings to the human form with limpet-like tenacity.

This was excusable in 1953, or even 1987, when your aliens ultimately had to be built around an actor or stuntman. But in the age of computer animation (when every spaceship in a sci-fi movie is an eye-straining mass of shifting pieces and fiddly bits) it's practically a crime. Where are the giant bugs? Where are the squids? Heck, just give me some centauroid aliens or some guys with three legs. I can't quite blame the writers for this, because of course production designers and costumers bear a lot of the responsibility.

I think it comes back to my perennial problem with moviemakers. They think we're stupid. They think audiences can't recognize a non-humanoid creature as intelligent. They think audiences won't think about why the alien villains are doing the things they do. I don't know how to fix this problem. But I do wish some moviemaker would take a chance and make a movie with believable aliens -- he might be surprised by how well it works out. It just so happens I've got some stories with aliens . . .  

Battleship (Part 2): What Could Have Been

I'm going to continue posting my reactions to watching the movie Battleship. Today I want to talk about a startling thought I had when it ended:

It could have been a good movie.

In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it began as a much better movie than it ultimately became. I don't have any way to see a copy of the original screenplay, but there are some odd bits which survived into the final version which hint at better things.

What's the focus of the movie? What's it about? Specifically: what's the title? It's called Battleship, and yet mysteriously the actual battleship Missouri gets much less screen time than the AEGIS destroyer John Paul Jones. How come? Pirates of the Caribbean has pirates doing stuff in the Caribbean. Citizen Kane has Charles Foster Kane in almost every scene. But Battleship doesn't have much battleship in it. 

There's also the curious presence of a Japanese warship, which gets sunk by the aliens, and her captain, who teams up with the boring young hero of the film. I owe my daughter a dollar because I bet her that the Japanese guy was in the movie so that at some point he could fight one of the blade-wielding aliens with a katana. I believed that because the movie was so blatantly dumb I couldn't think of any other reason they'd include a Japanese character. And yet, against all odds, he never once picked up a sword. Don't all Japanese guys in action movies use swords? What's the world coming to?

I'm going to advance the thesis that the Missouri and the Japanese guy are the last traces of a much better original screenplay. In this hypothetical Battleship, the focus isn't on Taylor Kitsch's irresponsible jerk of a junior officer. He's either a minor character or doesn't appear at all. Instead, the focus is on an elderly Navy veteran who serves as one of the volunteers aboard the museum ship Missouri. He's starting to feel as though he's lived too long -- most of his friends are gone, his family are off somewhere else, and the tourists who come to visit the Missouri don't seem to know or care anything about the ship and its history. The world apparently has no use for either the man or the ship.

Cue the aliens. They surround Hawaii with their forcefield and annihilate the remaining navy and National Guard forces inside the bubble. Our Japanese commander and his ship go down fighting but are rescued. A rag-tag bunch of surviving sailors from half a dozen countries converge on the Missouri as the only chance to stop the aliens. The Japanese officer must work with the elderly veteran to get the Missouri seaworthy in time. Instead of a two-minute montage set to AC/DC this would be the entire middle act of the film. We would see the desperate improvisations and know that the Missouri is underarmed, undermanned, and barely seaworthy. When the ship sets sail the audience and the characters know it's probably a one-way trip. 

That story has actual conflict among the characters. We can have some characters trying to preserve the historic Missouri while others are eager to see the last battleship do what she was built for. We can have our elderly protagonist take the chance to do something meaningful again, even if the physical strain may be too much for him. We can have the historical irony of a Japanese commander on the flag bridge of the Missouri as humans put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. 

This idea even dovetails nicely with the film's existing subplot about the legless soldier who's the only one near the radiotelescope when the aliens take it over. It's all so tidy I can't escape from the suspicion that this was the original idea for Battleship, but at some point someone said "We can't have a summer blockbuster about a guy in his eighties! Make the hero a young guy -- kind of reckless and irresponsible so the morons in the audience will be able to identify with him."

Writing fiction has given me a bad habit: I can't resist going "under the hood" of just about every story I read or film I watch. It's particularly depressing when the story I write in my head is better than the one I'm reading or watching. I think that's one reason why I found Battleship so annoying in its badness: the sheer waste involved. With just a little originality it could have been a good movie.

So the second lesson from Battleship is this: don't be wasteful. Don't scrap a decent idea just to stay within the safe template of your genre.   

 

Battleship (Part 1): Not Stupid Enough

My family recently rented the awful big-budget action movie Battleship, which of course was based on the board game. I learned a great deal from watching Battleship, mostly about things that I don't like. Today I'll talk about the first thing that bugged me: stupidity.

Battleship was stupid -- in a Facebook comment I said it was "fractally stupid" because the stupid parts were made up of smaller stupid parts. But stupidity isn't enough to make a movie irritate me as much as Battleship did. I tend to like dumb action movies, because I realized a long time ago that all movies are stupid. Seriously: movies are good at manipulating the audience's emotions through visuals and swelling music, but are universally awful at actually discussing ideas.

When movies try to tackle ideas more complicated than "Nazis are bad" or "It's funny when a pompous person gets hit with a pie" they seldom succeed. The things movies do well -- images, movement, and music -- are simply not suitable for presenting complex ideas. So a movie which wants to tackle ideas winds up either just filming people talking to each other, which seldom works well, or it has to caricature one side to make a point. When people say they like a movie's presentation of ideas, they generally mean they agree with the ideas presented, and consequently don't mind the caricaturing.

This isn't a problem. Ballet is also a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Architecture is a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Pretty much all art forms that don't involve text or lectures are poor media for presenting ideas. That's okay. You don't have to present ideas all the time. As Samuel Goldwyn said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."

Anyway. Battleship. My problem with the movie wasn't the stupid parts -- the parts where Navy ships are fighting aliens, astronomers are fighting aliens, a legless veteran is fighting aliens, or the USS Missouri is fighting aliens. Those were the fun parts.

The problems came up in the parts where the movie tried to not be stupid. Because nothing reveals fundamental stupidity like attempts at sophistication. There's an interminable sequence at the beginning of the movie intended to show that the main character is an irresponsible, impulsive jerk. This undoubtedly comes from some story meeting at which a writer put down his much-loved copy of Robert McKee's Story and said "What's his character arc?"

At which point nobody else did the sensible thing and said "What character arc? It's a movie about battleships shooting at aliens! Shut up!" Instead they gave us twenty minutes of Taylor Kitsch being an impulsive jerk. It might matter if this had any connection to the rest of the movie, but it doesn't. 

Once the aliens show up and the computer-animated warships start shooting at them, none of this matters in the least. Kitsch's character is thrust into a position of command when his ship's captain is killed, and he does a decent job of shooting at aliens. Some other characters may doubt his fitness to command, but nobody acts on this. Sensibly enough, they're all focused on saving the world from alien invaders.

Which means Kitsch's character's background as an impulsive jerk is irrelevant. He could be a grizzled veteran who drinks to forget, or a rigid martinet who needs to loosen up, or a virulent racist who needs to respect others, or an incorrigible joker who needs to get serious, or a womanizer who needs to settle down, or a chronic nailbiter who needs a manicure. It simply doesn't matter. We spend a tedious twenty minutes watching him be a jerk for no reason.

So the first lesson I learned from Battleship is this: know when to be stupid. If you're making a stupid movie, have the courage to be really stupid. If you're stupid enough, you might do something clever. But if you try to do something smart, you pop the fragile bubble of entertaining stupidity. 

 

Getting Rid of Books

This week my wife and I tackled the hardest task for any family of readers: getting rid of books.

Our house has about 200 feet of shelves, some of them packed two layers deep with books. We also have stacks of books in the office and the bedroom waiting to be read. They pile up faster than we can finish them.

So Diane and I made a first pass at culling the herd, going through our nonfiction (we'll get to fiction later). I began to notice a pattern in the books we agreed to get rid of.

The biggest group consisted of topics we aren't interested in any more. These are books that we bought in order to find out about something, and now that we've learned it, they aren't really worth re-reading. One example is a biography of "Wild Bill" Donovan I got while researching a novel about World War II spies.

I expect that in the future, my family won't buy many of these books -- at least, not in physical form. It makes much more sense to buy references for a particular project as ebooks, especially since that way I can keep the text right in my laptop so I don't have to lug a bagful of books around.

The second-biggest group were things that weren't as interesting as we thought they might be. In other words, disappointing books. A good example of this is a book called Globish, about the rise of English as the lingua franca of our time. It's not a bad book, really, but I got bored with it about halfway through and never felt like finishing. I've noticed that companion books to television series often fit into this category: they look cool and they cover interesting subjects, but they usually wind up being superficial.

I don't think that category will ever disappear completely. We will always buy books which aren't what we thought they would be, or works which simply disappoint. 

Finally there were the books that are simply obsolete. My copy of Charles Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things is a perfect example. It was a useful reference in the pre-Internet era, but now if I want to read up on the history of, say, Silly Putty, there are 290,000 results for a search of the words "Silly Putty History." Reference books which are out of date but not sufficiently old to be useful as historical sources also fit into this category. Note that these books are not just obsolete, they're increasingly obsolete as a class. I don't need to accumulate reference books on odd topics any more, and Project Gutenberg means a lot of older or obscure works are also available online.

 Now we've got a box of books to get rid of, and more will follow. I always let my friends go through them before disposing of them permanently. This way my friends can fill up their own shelves, so that when they eventually decide to get rid of books, I'll be right there to see if there's anything good.