Psycho-Pass

Over at Wasteland and Sky, the "100 best anime" series has come to an end.

There are a lot of items new to me on the list. Of the ones I'm familiar with though, I generally agree.

First - please, God, no for Attack on Titan. Yes, the quality of the animation is excellent, and it's a big deal, but it's such a dark, depressing mess embodying the worst of the zombie genre - though the monsters in question have more in common with the nightlands than traditional zombies. Maybe it picks up later, but five episodes of death, chaos, destruction, and angst in... I quit.

And Psycho-pass. Yes, I just complained about a dark series, and Psycho-pass, which deals with free will, good, and evil, is dark. That said, it's amazing. Despite my love for Gurren Lagann and Full Metal Alchemist, if there's a show on that list I'd recommend to someone who thought the Matrix or Blade Runner were deep, that would be it. They'll get something with kick ass action that's also more thoughtful.

For some more commentary on it:

Review: Blame

What do you get when you cross Gregory Benford's Great Sky River with a spaghetti western?

Blame.

A brief voiceover gives us the setting. In the far, far future where humanity lost the ability to communicate with the city it constructed, that they lived in, and so the city deemed them illegal residents, and began to exterminate humanity. Our story starts generations later.

An aside. Yes. Given the word choice, I'm sure some people would love to make it about the current immigration kerfluffle, but keep in mind this is a Japanese comic from 20-30 years ago, and Japan isn't exactly an immigration capital even now. Also, it's not the first to posit total war between man and machine - Saberhagen's Berzerker stories come to mind, as well as the future of the Terminator movies, of course.

The action starts right away - you see a small team of people scurrying through giant metal caverns and claustrophobic spaces, in search of a new food source for their village - these details being picked up over several minutes from hints dropped in conversation. The team is composed of kids, teens, and if that fact itself didn't show their desperation, it's later reinforced.

They get in trouble...

...and are rescued by a quiet, almost speechless man calling himself "Killy" - who is searching for humans with the net terminal gene.

Already, the similarities with Great Sky River show up - the desperate straights of the dwindling human population that found a sanctuary of sorts, but must still forage in the world of the machines to get by, living like rats in the walls in constant fear of being found, of their sanctuary broken.

And the westerns - a lone stranger shows up, rescuing the hunting party from the "safeguard". Back at the village, he brings with him the chance to survive, to secure a source of food, and perhaps return the city to human control. And so a team of villagers set out.

And so - through numerous twists I won't spoil - the village is brought to the brink of disaster, yet saved, and the lone stranger wanders off on his quest, never to be seen again.

The action sequences are amazing. The 3d-rendered shading style has vastly improved over efforts I'd seen in the past. The characters are memorable, with the competent and wise village leader, "pops" and his dutiful, competent son, are both noteworthy. Despite a few infodumps, they are short, added only as needed, and the personalities are drawn out with economy and clarity.

Well worth watching.

Hear Hear!

Ah, the space opera kerfluffle, cause in part by Tor celebrating space opera by having articles written on it by a person who doesn't like it, and by others who don't get why "opera."

The latest entry, with some insight.

Science fiction is about fiction and space opera is about opera. If people want to read about science or space, there are plenty of non-fiction books, magazines and journals to choose from. If people want to delve into ordinary human drama, they just have to live ordinary lives or pick up lit fic. The science in science fiction makes the fiction fun, and the space in space opera is the setting for the opera. 

Science fiction is not about dragging readers through muck and demanding they derive pleasure from it. Science fiction turns their eyes to the stars, and space opera takes them there. Space opera is about opera: the glory, the terror, the joy, the horror, the sorrow and the wonder that awaits the intrepid starman who dares to brave the infinite expanse.

Go read the thing already.

On Lasers and Spaceships and Explosions

Jon Del Arroz just posted over at superversive on space operas.

It’s #SpaceOperaWeek and I can think of no better way to launch my first regular Superversive column than to celebrate the genre in which I write and love. I’ll be doing more top fives as they feel appropriate, but as a writer of Space Opera, it makes a lot of sense to launch in celebration of some of my greatest influences. Naturally, these are just my opinions, so I expect outrage, disagreement, fist shaking, and the like at my choices. Just know that you’re wrong. It says definitive in the title, and we all know the internet never lies. 

Without further ado, your Space Opera Top Five!

While I'm sure some would have a few alternate suggestions, I'd say by and large they're all solid choices. No, I'm not a huge fan of the Vorkosigan books, but they're pretty entertaining, as are Elizabeth Moon's books.

Of the three I wholeheartedly recommend: 

The Hyperion Cantos. Dan Simmons gives Gene Wolfe a run for the money for "literary" and still writing compelling stories, though Simmons takes it more in the self-conscious direction. Hyperion very deliberately borrows from the structure of Canterbury Tales. Poetry and poems feature prominently, along with literary analysis of them. His Ilium includes space-roving artificial intelligences that analyze Shakespeare's sonnets. He's also guilty of badthink in the form of a time travel short story.

The Thrawn trilogy by Tim Zahn is everything that the prequels and sequels to the "original" Star Wars trilogy wished they could be.

And Lensmen - I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that, in addition to everything Jon mentions, we have massive fleet battles, and planets used as weapons as entire galaxies go to war.

Why No Ebooks?

Vox recently asked why aren't people buying e-books? Of course, the ilk reply.

Me, personally, I actually buy a LOT, though the handful of books that would make it on my limited shelf space these days I will get in paperback, with a stronger preference for philosophy, history, and technical material there. I enjoy the feel of physical books, but the lack of space and the sheer convenience of nor carding several small paper bricks around on vacation or to the beach trums a lot of other factors.

This comment reply by Vox jumped out at me:

I've stopped buying from Baen lately. 

I've been hearing more of this too. The fact that they have SJWs like John Joseph Adams - the Women Destroy SF guy - editing their anthologies does not bode well for them.

I'd noticed that - I look at the Baen listings, and the reviews of the latest anthologies, and if it's not Larry, John Ringo, or Travis, I can't get worked up over it. I have not bought a single one that wasn't one of the above three in a couple years.

They even let Scalzi in to one of the anthologies. That said - I'll likely still get it for the better stories.

Just Say "No" to Handmaids

Cataline Sergius throws himself on the grenade to watch the new version of the Handmaid's Tale.

I raise a glass to his sacrifice, so that the rest of us don't have to.

A Handmaid's Tale was cobbled together out of random bits of 1984 and Revolt in 2100 back in 1985, by noted crackpot and winner of the Extreme Canadian Award, Margret Atwood.

As I indicated the setting is stolen.  As is the plot and subtext.  The bad sex scenes are all Atwood's however.  She owns them.

For some reason when Feminists have decided they are feeling oppressed, like in the Eighties when Reagan was holding mass executions, they start passing this one around and saying, how important it is.  It's not of course but there's no telling insane Lefties that.

The book is about an extreme theocracy that takes over the United States and renames it Gilead.  This has to do with some kind of infertility plague, which isn't explained.  Anyway, fertile women are rounded up and put in a red robe to remind them of...sin?  Maybe Eve's?  Maybe their own?  I'd look it up but who the fuck cares?

In the meantime, his post on "Leaving Libertarian" echoes a lot of my experiences and reasons.  I will say that Libertarians are slightly less out of touch with reality than Marxists. Sure, we'd still need angels to make it work, they're stuck on materialism in a world that doesn't even need a supernatural creator to prove that insufficient, and so on, but at least it acknowledges the distributed decision making that occurs in the real world at many different scopes including ecologies, rather than worshipping at the altar of central control.

Crazy Cat Ladies R Us

On Saturday the Frisky Pagan reviewed a Hugo-nominated story called Our Talons can Crush Galaxies, by Brook Bolander. He was not kind.

I had no intention of reading it for myself to see if he was fair. First, the quotes he provides already make my skin crawl.

No, I'm not kidding.

I'm used to some grade-A solipsism and narcissism out of feminists, but rarely do I read things that, if the person writing them were in the room with me, I'd be looking for an escape exit and never, under any circumstances, be alone with them.

Some examples, you ask? Crap.

Let's start with the opener.

This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck

Yeah. Everything up through "me" would be an interesting opener, but no, we have to be edgy and curse and be vulgar.

Unfortunately, what it is a story of is even less pretty.

After starting out complaining how the heroes and the villains get all the attention, the victim doesn't even get a name, and so she won't tell you how she got killed...

So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no–one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion–brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.

No, it's not the story of that, and the victims are forgotten, but I'm still going to hint at how it went and you'll be grateful that I decided to hint at it when I said I wouldn't tell you.

So yes, as the Pagan has told us, we get to a set of bullet points as if in a power point presentation. And the very first point does indeed get contradicted later in the same story. "I meant nothing to him/he wanted to get her attention and she wouldn't even look at him." - but then borderlines I've been unfortunate enough to know wouldn't balk at such conflicts to their own vision of their righteousness.

I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down–in–the–dirt nitty–gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.

Yeah, petty. I'm sure some would defend it by pointing out how goods and spirits in Greek and other myths would interact with mortals for very mortal and small reasons - usually love, greed, jealousy, etc., but shawarma? How... hip. 

The thing is that this pettiness goes on.

I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee–ninsy bit motherfuckin’ pissed, maybe.

Again with the vulgarity and the teen-speak. What a small-minded god. That's not the pettiest part though. Flattening cities in six realities because she's a tee-ninsy bit pissed?

Let's leave aside the collateral damage and mass death of innocents for the crimes of one - she can't even be grandly pissed? High righteous anger? Maybe we're aiming at cool hipster understatement here. Sorry babe, death in the Sandman comics did it far, far better. And took her job far more seriously. Even when this godlet does things that are grandiose, she cannot at least admit to grandeur.

I may have cried. You don’t get to know that either, though.

She's still playing head games with her audience because we don't deserve to know. 

We swept back onto the mortal plane with a sound of a 1967 Mercury Cougar roaring to life on an empty country road, one sister in the front seat and three in the back and me at the wheel with a cigarette clenched between my pointed teeth. You can fit a lot of wingspan in those old cars, provided you know how to fold reality the right way.

Speaking of Neil Gaiman, I think she learned all the wrong lessons. Still petty though, no steeds, no lightning, no winds, not a quiet approach on foot. Nope, a '67 cougar and fitting the wings if you can fold reality. 

I dearly suspect this woman has never meditated, really, really thought, of ancient myth. This feat she takes care to mention wouldn't be worth mentioning by a Greek god, or an angel, except to note the wings or other visible traits were folded away, hidden. Of course they'd know how.

Did he cry? Oh yeah. Like a fuckin’ baby.

Yeah. Petty, sadistic pleasure at the suffering of the victim. This isn't justice. That said, note the focus. Not that the transgressor was punished, but that the transgressor suffered, cried.

Our talons can crush galaxies. Our songs give black holes nightmares. The edges of our feathers fracture moonlight into silver spiderwebs and universes into parallels. Did we take him apart? C’mon. Don’t ask stupid questions.

Yeah, playing head games with the audience again.

Anyway. Like I said way back at the start, this is not the story of how he killed me. It’s the story of how a freak tornado wrecked a single solitary home and disappeared a promising young man from a good family, leaving a mystery for the locals to scratch their heads over for the next twenty years. It’s the story of how a Jane Doe showed up in the nearby morgue with what looked like wing stubs sticking out of her back, never to be claimed or named. It’s the story of how my sisters and I acquired a 1967 Mercury Cougar we still go cruising in occasionally when we’re on the mortal side of the pike. 

 Except it's not most of those things. It's coyly dancing around the story of how she was killed, but certainly not avoiding it either. It is not the story of a freak tornado but of how they covered their actions in the story. Since she supposedly didn't tell us how she died, it's not the story of how a Jane Doe ended up in the morgue - the author barely hints at what happened, opens by saying she won't tell us even, before dancing around it. And why should I care about the car? They didn't acquire it! There's not story of how the went about getting it, they just manifested it, like they could have manifested a 68' Corvette or a Mercedes G-series.

You may not remember my name, seeing as how I don’t have one you could pronounce or comprehend. The important thing is always the stories—which ones get told, which ones get co–opted, which ones get left in a ditch, overlooked and neglected. This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. 

Still the superiority and head games. It's her story, and it will be there till the end of time with her. No other story matters.

Now. 

You can't diagnose someone from their writing - I dread someone digging up some of what I wrote in high school - but what I see of the author, in what they idealize, even though I'm perfectly well aware of the rule of not confusing an author's belief's with a character's, scares me. Why?

Because it's full of head games. It's about petty, nasty pleasures of the moment, petty, nasty, personal revenge over the equivalent of a mosquito bite - their talons crush galaxies, after all - about how she's sooooo much better than anyone else, about head games, about her utter unconcern for others who did her no harm and how she uncaringly destroys them across multiple realities because she's pissed, and ultimately, about how her story is the only one that really matters.

On Seagulls and Greatness

Over at Seagull Rising Jon Mollison discusses Cora Buhlert and her lack of awareness of what she refers to. Cora B in bold....

*Does anybody else find the idea of a rabid puppy taking inspiration from Jonathan Livingston Seagull of all things as funny as I do?

Of course she thinks it's funny.  She doesn't know what you're talking about.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the story of a seagull whose unwillingness to conform to the demands of the crowd results in his expulsion from the flock.  It was adopted by the hippy-dippy movement in the 1970s as they struggled to escape the conformity provided by hard work, the Christian faith, and showers.  Cora still operates under that out-dated mindset, clinging to the notion that true rebels write works that conform to the demands of the university system, major publishing houses, Hollywood, every major media outlet, and most major businesses like Target, Google, and Starbucks.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the story of a seagull whose unwillingness to conform to the demands of the crowd results in his expulsion from the flock.  Her mirth makes it clear that she either has not read the work in question - which is largely agnostic on matters of politics, hewing closer to  a 'you be you even if it means going against the majority' message than to her assumed 'stick it to the man, and once you are the man, stick it to those who want to stick it to the man' message.  Proving once again...

These people don't read

I agree utterly - these people don't read. Most of what I've seen on the hugos, and I've looked, is about what kind of authors and characters were in the story, and what they reference. "And there's this girl, and she's black, and she has lucid dreams and it's, like, Freudean, and.." - yeah, fuck off, I'll go re-watch Dreamscape or re-read the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Oh, wait, that's the article describing a new comic series Afar. It's cool because it has a new twist on Freudian dream theory, you see, and this girl is utterly helpless through most of it, then she makes a horrible mistake she can't undo, but it's all about us and our dreams, and...

Nevermind.

Where were we? Oh, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

I hate to Break it to Jon, but I think he missed an important point of the book, which I first read back in 4th grade a long time ago.

Sure, it's not about specific politcs - it's about the willingness to follow a path even if it's not in lockstep march with what everyone tells you in general, and as he points out, that is by no means the monopoly of the left or liberals, especially when they have become the man.

Here's where it goes deeper. It's not just that our intrepid seagull is determined to do his own thing - all the seagulls "fly" after a fasion. They all dive for fish, after a fashion. They all eat, after a fashion. It is that he is utterly dedicated to excellence. What sets him apart is is his quest to be the best, to fly the best. To find the limits of what is possible and maybe even push a bit further. He could of course choose something else, and of course he is not content to just live life like the herd - but he wants to achieve mastery.

Often in life, we have to accept good enough, but to master ourselves, to achieve excellence, there have to be areas we care about where "good enough" is not good enough.

UPDATE: In all fairness to Jon - on rereading this I realized I made it sound like Jon didn't realize there were more meanings to the story. A guy who's site is called "Seagull rising".

Yeah, right.

So - first of all, sorry Jon, it was a failure in my writing to not make it clear that Cora B's failure to grok JLS went far deeper than just "outsider evicted for bucking the flock" but to excellence and working for it, for, as Jon pointed out elsewhere, the art of the whole and not just badly assembled very pretty bits of craft. The fault was not, as I made it appear, in your understanding of JLS.

I for one am a person who hates to draw distinctions between, say, illustrators, and artist, and craft is ultimately required for most great art, but Jon is utterly correct - one can master craft, and not know how to put the whole thing together into a thing of beauty. A cargo cult of mistaking the craft for the art, without understanding the spirit, the soul of the thing.

BURN BABY BURN!

Hey, my apologies for referencing a disco song, but as much as I like Yngwie Malmsteen, I won't subject you to "Now Your Ships Are Burned."

Anyway, Jon Del Arroz writes on blacklists, the need to make others aware of them, and more importantly , the need to, as Vox would put it, to develop alternate platforms.

More to the point, to forge forth and not look back.

It all comes down to blackballing again. And here’s where I call to you writers: burn the ships and don’t look back.

By which I mean get rid of these middlemen and gatekeepers who have this mentality. You don’t need them. You don’t need the contract they offer you to be legitimate in the world today. Amazon, evil corporate monopoly that it is, has leveled the playing field and gotten rid of all barriers to entry. A “real” publisher won’t market you anyway — they don’t spend resources on new writers, only established brands. You’ll be left in the wind there as much as you are on your own, but without control of your own product, and receiving a lower percentage on every sale for your work. There is literally no benefit to these middlemen’s existence. They are only there to tell you what you’re allowed to write and what readers are allowed to read. Their opinions might not even match up with readers at all.

You are a real writer. If you’re getting good feedback on your work, don’t hesitate. Put it out there. That’s the only way to get ahead: especially if you’re white, male, Christian, conservative, any or all of those things. They gatekeepers hate you for who you are, and it doesn’t matter how good your work is. Stop giving those Christaphobic racist, sexist bigots validation by seeking yours through them.

And if I can't in good conscience subject you to that one particular track off of Rising Force, maybe I can give you a decent substitute:

In Case of Social Justice Break Glass

And pull out some wrongthink. (Hat tip to Brian Niemeier)

The Wrongthink Sci-Fi Giveaway is about showcasing authors who have been marginalized by the gatekeepers of the sci-fi publishing industry for the sin of not complying with progressive social justice dogma. From Sarah Hoyt, who was accused of racism and ”internalized misogyny” for her association with the Sad Puppies campaign to reform the Hugo Awards, to Nick Cole, who lost a publishing contract for daring to write a story about an artificially intelligent computer who is troubled by abortion, these authors have faced smear campaigns, boycotts and blacklisting for failing to toe the progressive line.

Far from being discouraged by the social justice crybullies, however, these authors have thrived by continuing to focus on writing great stories that connect with readers. And now they are teaming up to help spread the word about each other’s books.

The real winner in all this is you, the avid sci-fi reader. We’re holding a huge giveaway and giving away seven kickass sci-fi titles just for entering. In addition, three winners will each receive seven MORE books.

Just for entering, you’ll get:

Curious to know what's in it? How to enter? Well -head to the site and find out.....

A Splinter in the Mind

Ages ago, shortly after Star Wars came out, Alan Dean Foster released a novel of a Star Wars followup story with an awesomely cool cover that included Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader. I was young - innocent to the ways of movie tie ins - and it was much later that I learned that this author was also the author of the first Star Wars book, supposedly written by George Lucas. By then I'd already ready more than a fair bit of Foster's stuff, including With Friends Like These... and the followon collection Who Needs Enemies, all the available Flinx and Pip books, most of the Humanx books, and the Spellsinger books.

Oh, and he wrote a hell of a lot of movie novelizations as well, including the book version of The Last Starfighter.

So I read this book, and enjoyed it. And when Empire came out, and later Jedi, got really confused because things didn't mesh up with the book I'd read.

I expected things to make sense.

Anyway, I was recently reminded of this book when I stumbled into this review of it at Recalcitrant Male Watches Cinema:

On its own, Splinter of the Mind's Eye is a solidly entertaining, reasonably well-written piece of light pulp. It doesn't really fit well into what the franchise would later become and got swept under the rug more often than not by later writers, but Dark Horse Comics adapted the story in the 90s with a bunch of continuity fixes to bring it closer in line with the Expanded Universe proper. It doesn't have a whole lot of substance going on, and its not as grandly ambitious as The Thrawn Trilogy, but I would recommend it as a snapshot of the humble early years of Star Wars.

Kalvaitis notes is strengths, weaknesses, its background, and the various issues that caused it to later be ignored. Worth reading, and in my memory, a fun book.

Diversity and SF Sales

We are repeatedly assured that we need "diverse" characters (of uniform belief) so that women, and other minorities than while males (women are not a minority) can see themselves in the characters to better appreciate the story and the role model.

I'm going to ignore for the moment the whole "content of character" not being the same as "color of skin/shape of genitals" thing, and take them for their word.

If we need people who represent us - let's leave aside stories with alien protagonists, etc. that we've enjoyed, we're not dealing with reality but SJW-world - then stories who's protagonists are female will not appeal to men by the same logic that male protagonists supposedly don't appeal to women.

If stories with white protagonists cannot be understood or appreciated by blacks, then, in the US, writing a black protagonist excludes roughly 80% or more of the population.

If stories with straight characters cannot be appreciated by gay people, then the inverse is that the 90+% of the world, more likely 97+%, that isn't LGBTBBQWHATEVER will never appreciate it or gain insight from it.

Instead of believing in a universal human experience that can be, at times, touched even by people who don't share them, we instead eliminate large swathes of the potential market (and if you argue that straight people can appreciate LGwhatever-protag fiction, what's the problem with the opposite, again?).

As I mentioned with computers - in this day and age, and even with the gatekeepers given how eager they were for the "correct" kinds of authors and views, the only thing keeping "minorities" and minorities from publishing to their available audience, even if you agree on it being so self-limiting, is their own desire to do so.

But if you buy this "must be representative" drivel, and a publisher can only put out , say, 20 books a year, even if the percentage of minorities enjoying SF were the same as for the bemoaned "white men" demographic, then every book published targeting 10% or less of the available audience will exclude everyone else who doesn't fit, and not sell as well.

And then they wonder why the market share for SJW-themed comics and books is falling off a cliff.

Congratulations to Peter Grant

His Brings the Lightning - an excellent, excellent read - won the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Book Alliance Book of the Year for 2017.

I'm very grateful for my readers' support.  This is a minor competition, to be sure, but the competition was fierce - to go up against John Ringo and Larry Correia was tough!  Thank you for coming through for me with your support.

Did I mention it's an excellent book? Go, read it.

If you're looking for something more science-fiction, check out the Maxwell Saga, starting with Take the Star Road.

Oh, and Ringo's take on Larry's MHI-verse is a fun read too. 

Awesome Christian Artists

Jon Del Arroz is posting in support of John Wright's crusade, and decided to highlight nine christian artists he thought worth supporting in the fields of writing, comics, and music. Looking at the list, I realize that I only recognize three of the names. Now, three I don't recognize are in comics, which I'm not as familiar with, but not only had I not heard of Nadine Brandes under writers, but the only musician I had heard of, in passing, was Dashboard Confessional.

I can wholeheartedly recommend anything and everything I've read by John C Wright, and having read Nethereal and just finished Souldancer I will also strongly recommend reading those two as well, as well as trying anything else by Brian Niemeier. The cosmology, the characters, the totally off the rails mashup of magic, technology, and horror of the series is utterly amazing.

Looks like I'm going to be digging into a bit more music.

No Such Thing

Jim Fear elaborates a bit on his earlier post on hard SF. This paragraph caught my eye:

I view what we're trying to do here in military terms. Maybe I've been listening to Sabaton too much lately, which is entirely possible, but this is how I've been conceptualizing it. There is, as I said, a crumbling edifice that I'll dub Tradpub (yes I stole that from Brian Niemeier shaddap). Tradpub is a kingdom on the decline. It ruled with an iron fist for many years, but now there are many disparate forces that are looking at the jewels heaped inside and thinking, "I'll be damned, but those would look mighty spectacular in my coffers." There are also those that just want to burn the place to the ground to watch the light show. And so, not through any conspiracy but through sheer organic growth, armies formed and began to assail the kingdom of Tradpub. The two we're concerned with are the Superversive Army and the Forces of the Pulp Revolution. [emphasis mine]

 Before I get on with any commentary - there is no such thing as too much Sabaton. Sure, it's nice to listen to Iron Maiden, Yngwie, Nightwish, I even Like Dragonforce, and of course prog rock, etc., but too much Sabaton?

Never!

Where was I?

Oh yeah, go read his post.

And since he posted Blood of Bannock Burn:

My First Palladium

Over at Castalia, on guilty pleasures no-one has played:

I’ll always have a bit of a soft touch for Palladium games. I mean… no sooner had I stumbled across a stray copy of the iconic Moldvay Basic D&D set, than I had a desire for something like that, but weirder. And Palladium was right there waiting with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. After the cartoon and the movies, it’s hard to imagine how freaky that was when it was new. I spent countless hours rolling up characters and daydreaming about the Terror Bears, a twisted take on the then ubiquitous Care Bears. It was just awesome.

I bought TMNT in high school because it just. Looked. Freakin'. Cool. The system was a hot mess, but what a glorious mess. I also ended up buying a copy of the firs Mechanoid Invasion book left laying around, which channeled, in a lot of ways, the same mood as Gregory Benford's Great Sky River. 

The Palladium games I actually ended up playing any significant amount of were the Macross-based Robotech books they published.

But good lord I loved having them all.

Tha Backstory, tha Whole Backstory, and Nothing But tha Backstory, Pt 2

LLoyd Jenkins made this comment to my first post on "backstory" (I promise, I will get around to John Wick).

Hollywood is in love with the idea that the Hero changes during the movie. I get tired of it. What about setting right what was made wrong? I admit the backstory affects the actions of the characters. but that is characterization in my book.

Hollywood isn't the only one. 

In the afterword to Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story, he explains that what makes drama "drama" is that the characters change in nature. In that story specifically, he wanted the characters to change roles - that the bad guy be the victim, that the victim be revealed to be the good guy, and the good guy be revealed to be the villain. 

But yes, it's the standard script. One of the worst things you can do in literary circles is to disparage something as "melodrama." There has to be transformation. Next, someone took Campbells "Hero of a Thousand Faces" and determined that every story had to not only be a transformative story, but be a story about growth of the protagonist. It has to be a D&D story about leveling up and not a Traveller story where you win some, you lose some, maybe you learn, maybe you don't. 

Yes, we have literary snobbery and need for "drama" (and what mental types need/crave constant drama to feel engaged? Narcissists and borderlines...) combined with the easiest possible formula for said drama.

I kid you not that it is everywhere, not just Hollywood. If you go back through the podcast Writing Excuses (even the better pre-Kowal episodes), the heroes journey and hollywood writing formula are explicitly discussed and promoted.

Of course, simply transforming the protagonist, letting him grow wasn't enough. Combine that with post-modernism and nihilism, tearing everything down, and you get character arcs that either end in cynicism, or where all the work and effort are proven futile. 

The latter is why, typical political jabs aside, I generally loathe zombie stories. Generally, all hope is transient and futile, wasted. Sometimes it's funny - Shaun of the Dead, for example - but rarely outside of Ringo's stories and the book version of World War Z, will you find a book on zeds I like.

I'm basically on board with the post on "The Girl with the Bitey Mask" at Castalia House. I'll also add the following - teacher teaching zombie kids is not original. That was in a story I read shortly before giving up on a Zombie-themed anthology. And the title and concept of the movie? About as purely full of hatred for humanity as possible, to even in the title of the work state that the extinction and replacement of humanity was a good thing.

Japan Has Some Awesome SF

Walker has recently had some excellent posts on SF in Anime, including looking at the influences that Votoms, Dougram, Macross, and Crusher Joe have had on, among other things, Battletech. So it's fair to say that there's a lot of evidence that they've not been as susceptible to Social Justice Convergence. They certainly inspired one of my favorite movies, which Jeffro would find refreshingly short on excessive backstory.

As with Star Wars, Japan's long-running pop-culture SF/F franchises are built on pulpy and superversive foundations- despite significant differences in mood, theme, tone, and subject matter. Mobile Suit Gundam, as much as it gets the billing for making "Real Robot" a viable subgenre, has protagonists and antagonists motivated by passion and desire beyond all material drives- something that persists across the franchise. Space Battleship Yamato is a Space Opera that E.E. Smith would approve of, as is Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross. The Dragon Ball franchise is full of this stuff; for all the jokes about a five-minute move taking 30 episodes to execute, the heroes hero because it's right and the villains (for the most part) are evil and don't apologize for it.

There is, and always has been, some great stuff. There is also of course, and always has been, a lot of dreck. Given that my start in anime was a combination of some morning cartoons available in the Boston area and Star Blazers, followed by the release of the Robotech series, I'm not the otaku some are, but I do have a fair bit of perspective. Shortly after Robotech started, I dug in and discovered a wealth of movies, starting - for better or for worse - with Megazone 23, and quickly jumping to more titles than I can remember. Gundam, the Lensman movie, the Iczer series, Bubblegum Crisis, the Macross movie, Golgo 13, the Arion movie, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, Area88, Project A-Ko,  more damn esper movies than I can count, etc.

A lot of it was trading videotaped copies. Having a second or third gen copy off of a laser disk original was worth something.

Once out in the world things took a slump as deployments and obligations cut down on time for cons and getting a hold of material - and we were in that weird limbo before massive bandwidth where some good stuff was starting to show up on the cartoon network like Cowboy Bebop, and the Ghost in the Shell movie, but not a lot, yet. Then netflix and streaming services came along, and while I don't watch much TV, a good chunk of what I do watch is anime.

Positives? Given I haven't watched too many "slice of life" movies - action. Some fantastic art. A lot of genre bending. Off the wall ideas pushed to their limits. Negatives? Well, it's pretty easy to find some very dark and nihilistic stuff - I'm not a huge fan of DeathNote - a lot of "loser is inexplicably attractive to girls" harem series, a number of very angsty and mopy boys, and Dragon Ball is hardly the only series to stretch out five minutes of story.

Take Bleach. Well enough done I ended up watching a lot of it, but the entire "Soul Society" sequence was almost nothing but backstory of every major character and how they got there, with a minute or two of plot continuation, before - finally - wrapping everything up in the last minute or two of the sequence.

It Aint "Realism"

Ben Cheah has an insightful writeup on why ‘Gritty’ and ‘Realistic’ SFF Isn’t. The whole piece is worth a read, but the following puts very poetically something I've told a lot of people in response to "but it's realistic!":

Everybody knows the darkness of the human heart. Open a newspaper and you will see terrorist atrocities, gangland wars, murderers, child abuse and lying politicians in abundance. Evil lurks everywhere in the world. Humans can be beastly, cowardly, bloodthirsty, vicious and covetous creatures. This is reality.

Yet humans can also be noble. Churches have sponsored universities and hospitals, opposed tyrants and freed slaves, and propagated virtues and values. Ultra-rich people give away millions or billions of dollars every year to charitable causes. Strangers have banded together to help people in need. Troops and civilians demonstrate valour on and off the battlefields of the world. This, too, is reality.

Every man has two aspects. One is craven, power-seeking, vengeful, petty, and self-centred. The other is selfless, kind, virtuous, determined and undefeatable. A truly realistic work would reflect both sides of human nature. ‘Realistic’ SFF works shun this holistic approach, seeking only to amplify the former.

As GoT, the Walking Dead, and many other SF&F stories of recent decades strive to remind us, we are horrible, broken creatures, fallen, with redemption but a cruel illusion, slaves to our lusts and desires.

This isn't "realism" or "grittiness". Redeeming the bad guy per Malificent or Wicked isn't giving him an understandable motive, it's sticking your head in the sand to pretend evil doesn't exist. Wallowing in incest and murder and cruelty as GoT does, making out Ned Stark or others with pretentions to nobility as chumps isn't gritty either. It's pushing the pendulum too far in the other direction. It's not an uncompromising portrayal of something unpleasant, it's obsessing over the unpleasant to the exclusion of all else.

There is more to life than that. We are both angels and demons. Life has glory and virtue as well as pain and suffering. Painting the world as only a dark place where light and virtue are illusory removes the contrasts. It turns the production from something that could be vivid to a morally monochromatic mud.

One song that always comes to mind for me when thinking of struggling against the darkness of the world, the contrasts required to see all of reality and humanity, and the nobility we can achieve, is "Eye of the Storm" by the Cruxshadows.

There is no love untouched by hate
no unity without discord
there is no courage without fear
there is no peace without a war
there is no wisdom without regret
no admiration without scorn
there is strife within the tempest-
but calm in the eye of the storm...

The pages of our history
are written by the hand
with eyes and ears and prejudice
too far removed- to understand
and so the heroes of the ages past
are stripped of honesty- and love
to make them seem less noble
and hide what we can become

On a completely different note, he's also got an excellent writeup on why women aren't just men with breasts eviscerating the Rat Queens. I read that comic - or what was included in the Hugo packet, a couple years ago, and this is entirely spot on.

Larry's Storytelling Ethos on Steroids

Larry Correia, much like the rest of the puppy crew, has repeatedly said that it's perfectly OK to have messaging in stories, but that awesome story comes first. He went even further, and stated that art should not be a successful author's first concern, but instead:

My personal philosophy is that all writers need to put GET PAID in their mission statement. All that artistic creative stuff is nice too, but make sure GET PAID is in there (in all caps).

Others have pointed out that Larry's work was "pulp" before there was a pulp revolution, breaking genre barriers as well as PC ones.

Thesis: The writings of +Larry Correia are pure #PulpRevolution.

Let's run through the supporting reasoning.

1 Action Oriented: Larry writes action. Larry writes GOOD action. Larry writes action scenes that blow the top of your head off. In fact, Larry has said that if he goes 5000 words without an action scene, he starts to get twitchy and feels the need to blow something up. (Paraphrasing, obviously.)

So I find it appropriate to look around and recognize the following. The pulp revolution ethos is Larry's storytelling ethos dialed up to eleven. Not only screw worrying about PC checklists for skin color, gender(s), or what not, awesome first, screw genre too.

As Larry's own books,  and the pulp revolution show, awesome knows no genre.

OK, one exception. Maybe nihilistic navel gazing liberal wankery knows no awesome.