Tagged: Science Fiction

Saga Volume Seven by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention.

Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina  series with artist Tony Harris, and I’ve been giving each of his projects the side-eye since then, watching to see if the same thing would recur. That’s probably not fair, and it might have made my posts on the earlier Saga books — volumes one , two , three , four, five , and six — less useful than they could be.

But there’s an essential tension in a standalone, ongoing comic book: is this one story, or is it a series of stories? Most comics tell several stories in a row: sometimes simply, with a story in each issue, and sometimes complexly, across dozens of issues of dozens of titles for two months to then abruptly stop and pick back up with the next big crossover. But Spider-Man or JLA or Marvel as a whole is not a story — they’re walls made up of separate but interconnected stories.

Saga, though, has always presented itself as a story. A story told by a grown-up Hazel, some time in the future, which presumably explains how she can tell us things that happened in secret far away to other people. A story with a single through-line: how this family got through a galactic war and (we hope) found peace. So we’re expecting more than just twenty-some pages of action each month; it all has to add up to the story of this family.

And the longer a story goes on, the bigger the ending has to be to suit it. (Ask George R.R. Martin.) With the issues collected in this Volume Seven , Saga is now forty-two issues long — that might be half of the whole, or more, or less. We don’t know. The debt of that ending is continuing to grow, and will grow until we get to it.

Is it a good sign or a bad one that this volume collects a complete arc, with a definitive shape? (Does that make it a story, or a chapter?) This is some of the strongest work in Saga since the beginning, as if Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples cracked their knuckles and said “OK, we got the family back together — now it’s time to fuck shit up.” That’s a good sign, whichever way you fall on the story question.

In the end, I think I land on a slightly different set of questions: is Saga still compelling? is it still moving in the same direction? does it seem to have not just a vector but real velocity on its path? are these people still real and true to themselves?

And, from these issues — or this chapter, or this Volume Seven, call it what you will — the answer to all of those questions is still yes. So I’m still on board, though I would like to have a sense of how big the story will be overall. All stories have to end, even the good ones. Even this one. Stories that don’t end aren’t stories, they’re just things that happened.

And I want Saga to be a story. It has the potential to be a great one.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Bad Machinery, Vol. 7: The Case of the Forked Road by John Allison

The Mystery Tweens are solidly becoming Mystery Teens in The Case of the Forked Road , which means the boys have all seemingly lost 50 IQ points and keep punching each other for no reason. [1] So any mystery solving will be left to the girls, this time out.

Since this is a volume seven, before I go any further, there are two notes. First is that you don’t need to know anything going into this book. Well, OK: these are kids in a secondary school in Tackleford, the oddest town in England. You can pick that up from the book, and it’s all you need to know. Also, this is a collection of a webcomic , so you can always read as much of it as you want online.

But, if you do want to know more, let me direct you to my posts about Bad Machinery books one , two , three , four , five , and six . You may also be interested in the pre-Bad Machinery comic Scary Go Round , also set in Tackleford, which led to the comic-book format Giant Days, of which there have been several collections so far: one two three four .

The book version of The Case of the Forked Road, as usual, is slightly expanded from the webcomics version, with some pages redrawn a bit and others added to aid the flow. It also begins with a new page introducing the main characters and ends with several related old Scary Go Round pages — both of those introduced and narrated by Charlotte Grote, Allison’s current troublemaking smart-girl character (following a string of such in the past).

As usual, Allison is great at capturing speech patterns and the half-fascinated, half-oblivious attitude of teens — the girls discover a mystery this time, in the suspicious activities of a elderly lab assistant they call “Grumpaw.” But they have no idea what this guy’s name is, and have to go through convolutions just to get their investigation started.

They do, of course, and eventually find a fantastical explanation to the question of Grumpaw and the mysterious and strangely ignorant schoolboy Calvin. And the dangers they have to deal with this time out are directly related to the stupid violence of some male classmates. (Though the cover shows that it’s not the boy Mystery Teens; they stay offstage most of the time, and are useless when they’re on it.)

Allison writes smart stories that wander interestingly through his story-space and gives his characters very funny, real dialogue to say on every page. And I think his stories are best when he draws them himself: his line is just as puckish and true as his writing. That makes the Bad Machinery cases the very best Allison books coming out now.

One last point: if you’ve complained that previous Bad Machinery volumes — wide oblong shapes to show off the webcomic strips — were physically problematic, then you are in luck. The Case of the Forked Road is laid out like normal comic-book-style pages, just as these strips appeared online. So you no longer have that excuse, and must, by law, buy Forked Road immediately.

[1] If you think this is some kind of sexist nonsense, my currently sixteen-year-old son can tell you a story of some of his fellow students on his recent trip to Germany and Italy. These young men got into trouble because they were throwing some “hot rocks” around — as you do when you discover some rocks that are warmed by the sun, in a nice hotel in a foreign county — until, inevitably, windows got broken. There are boys who avoid the Enstupiding and Masculinizing Ray of Puberty, but they are few and beleaguered, and the general effects of the ray hugely debilitating.

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Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Dennis O’Neil: Alfred Bester’s Squinkas

Read any good squinkas lately?

If you’re a comic book editor, you’d better hope you have, though, if you did, you probably called them, these squinkas, something else. Scripts, maybe.

I was introduced to the word, squinka, by a gentleman who certainly was an editor, one of the two or three best I ever worked for in a career of something like 50 years (which just goes to show you what can be achieved if you manage to breathe regularly and often. Ooops! I just let it slip – the secret of success in the writing dodge. If the writer refuses to breathe, the rest of it is irrelevant.)

Before beginning his long and illustrious stint behind a desk at DC Comics, young Mr. Schwartz was a literary agent whose specialty was peddling science fiction stories to the pulps – fiction magazines that were garish and cheap and widely available. Even after Mr. Schwartz migrated to DC, he maintained an interest in science fiction, which was occasionally manifest in the kind of comics he produced, the kinds of stories he liked to tell, and the questions he asked, often about the folk he knew from his agenting days, when imaginative tales were tainted with disreputability. They were, you know, trash.

That calumny didn’t seem to bother SF partisans much. Writers continued writing, editors continued editing, artists continued picture-making and gradually, the taint faded and then, somehow, the aficianados began to number in the millions and the production costs of the film versions of this trash climbed into the eight-figure neighborhood.

Rewind back to comics’ youth, when the medium was week-by-week and month-by-month inventing itself and creators might not have their tool kits in order. To be specific: they might not have had industry-wide formats or even names for everything they produced.

Motion pictures had been telling stories for some 35 years and had developed a vocabulary – necessary to facilitate communication, if for no other reason. But these here funny books? They were the new kids on the block. Their ancestors were arguably the aforementioned movies, newspaper comic strips and those naughty pulps, all of which shared certain similarities with the comic books. But they weren’t the same, not by a stretch.

So, I’m guessing, somebody saw a hole and decided to fill it. Neologisms anyone?

But the new word wasn’t very healthy. It didn’t last long. I never heard anyone, in or out of comics, use it. By the time Roy Thomas brought me into the comics herd, it had come and gone. I wouldn’t know that “squinka” had ever existed if I hadn’t stumbled across it in a collection of stories, articles and essays by Alfred Bester titled redemolished. Bester was, among other things, the recipient of the first Hugo, an award given to the creator of outstanding works of sf and, believe it or not, one of Mr. Schwartz’s clients. And a comic book writer; Green Lantern comes to mind.

I don’t know if Mr. Bester ever said “squinka” in his dealings with comics editors. Now days, nodding to his television colleagues, he might just say “script” and run for the subway.

Dennis O’Neil: What Is Star Wars?

heinlein_waldomagicinc-6000405We ended last week’s dissertation by asking if superhero stories are science fiction. You remember? Good. I cherish your acuity. And, acute citizen that you are, you have already broadened the question to include pulp stories and entertainments like the Star Wars franchise.

Let’s focus on that, for surely we are all familiar with it. The Star Wars saga has spaceships, ray guns, bizarre aliens and even a girl who is clad in a harem costume for no other reason, apparently, than that she’s awfully cute: all stuff that used to be staples of science fiction, especially the pulpy kind. But I don’t recall those words – science fiction – being used to describe anything Star Warsian. And the stories themselves contain no references to real world (universe) science or extrapolation from current reality. In fact, the storytellers go out of their way to deny any such connections: the first movie begins with the words “Long, long ago in a galaxy far away…” In other words, dear moviegoer, you can hunker back in your seat and forget about measuring what’s happening on the screen against what’s possible. Dammit, just enjoy!

But here a conundrum puts us in mud. If something looks like science fiction and acts like science fiction, don’t those qualities, in fact, make it science fiction? You’re asking me? (Perhaps I should have tried harder not to doze during those eight a.m. philosophy classes, though I don’t know if Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics would contribute much to our discourse.) As noted above, a conundrum, and one with no ready solution.

We know that civilization would be well-nigh impossible without classification, codification, grouping the chores that absorbed Linneaus and Aristotle and their ilk. We have to know what things are and we have to have names for them if we want to talk about them, which we do. Let us unequivocally approve of calling things names and giving those names precise meanings. None of which tells us what Star Wars is.

I’m hardly the first to address this problem. A few decades ago, around 1940, well before Star Wars, someone coined the term “science fantasy” for Robert Heinlein’s novel Magic Inc. Maybe that’s as close as we can come, right now. As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction tells us, “science fantasy” has never been clearly defined. So maybe we’re stuck with it.

But...bleech! Generally I feel kindly toward oxymorons and that’s what I believe this is, but something about it irritates me. It’s clunky, right? Can’t we do better by Star Wars? Find a new classification? Or… hmmmm maybe we’re in the process of evolving past our need to classify. And wouldn’t that be interesting, and significant, and just possibly scary?

Maybe they’ve already done it, those inhabitants of a long ago in a galaxy far away.

Dennis O’Neil: What Is Science-Fiction?

Hannes Bok

We saw a science-fiction movie a few days ago. And you shrug: so what? Is there a multiplex in the land of the free that isn’t showing science-fiction? Especially if you count superheroes as SF?

There are a couple of answers to that question. Let us discuss.

When SF first began to creep onto the nation’s newsstands, and much less frequently into its bookstores, it was pretty easy to identify. It dealt with science, technology, distant worlds, extraterrestrials and, with few exceptions, the future. The heroes tended to be stalwart, competent, practical. Scientists, or maybe military guys. The odd engineer or two. The women were…there. Plots turned on the kind of stuff stalwart, competent and practical gentlemen might find themselves involved in. Endings were generally optimistic. (We might encounter evil aliens out there between the stars, we noble humans, and they might give us a lot of grief, but in the end we kicked their ass, or whatever passed for an ass on tentacled monsters.) Fine prose was not much of a concern. Plot and plain vanilla storytelling – those were foremost. The literati scoffed. If it’s good, the canard went, it isn’t science-fiction.

Then came the changes, as young and very smart writers who valued literary niceties and had spent some time in science classes began to explore the genre. They experimented and expanded SF’s parameters, but one rule of their predecessors remained pretty much inviolate: Writers weren’t allowed to contradict was known about the real world. They could extrapolate and, in effect, guess about where new technologies and scientific discoveries would take us, but they couldn’t just make this kind of stuff up.

By this criterion there hasn’t been much so-called “hard science-fiction” on screens for years. (We might rationalize the mini-miracles in, say, Star Wars, and your correspondent might not be above such activity, but explanations aren’t included in the script.)

As for comic books… the editor-god of the field, Stan Lee, once told me that readers will believe what we give them because we give it to them. In other words, they want to be entertained, not educated. No harm in that.

But twice recently, as a matter of fact, I have experienced hard SF in my local multiplex. Last year there was Gravity and though some eminent scientists complained that plot events couldn’t have happened as they were depicted, by and large the movie stuck to what is. Great flick, too. And that SF movie we saw a few days ago: It’s called The Martian and like Gravity it begins with a scientific blooper, one that the film makers were apparently aware of from the git-go and were willing to ignore for the sake of storytelling. Like Gravity, The Martian delivers plenty of entertainment while sticking pretty closely to those pesky facts.

I doubt that anyone would refuse to call The Martian science-fiction, despite the relative lack of glitz and spectacle. So yes: it’s SF.

All those other movies, the superheroes and all that play fast and loose with those facts?. Are they not SF? Maybe that should wait till next week.

Weekend Window Closing Wrap Up: December 22, 2013

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Closing them on my desktop so you can open them on yours. Here we go:

What else? Consider this an open thread.

Weekend Window Closing Wrap-Up: December 14, 2012

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Closing windows on our desktops so you can you open them on yours. Here we go…

 

Anything else? Consider this an open thread.

 

WORNOM’S ‘THE ENIGMA CLUB’ FEATURED IN THIS MONTHS FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION!

  • News
  • July 22, 2013
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Author Rus Wornom is featured in the July/August issue of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE with a story that harkens back to Pulp Adventures of the 1920s and 30s.

‘IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FROZEN FIRE’ features the mysterious adventurers of THE ENIGMA CLUB!  The mysterious M4, master of espionage and disguise, travels to the frozen wastes of Ghutranh and encounters a diabolical trap set for him by his arch-nemesis, the nefarious Cobra!  Trapped in an unearthly landscape of icy death, M4–Enigma Club founding member Commander Denis Cushing–discovers a terrifying secret, and must do battle with a team of assassins . . . and an unspeakable threat that has survived in the Arctic snows for millennia.  There he comes face to face with a terror from beyond the seas of eternity . . . “In the Mountains of Frozen Fire!”

THE ENIGMA CLUB is a contemporary pulp adventure novel, currently being marketed by Wornom’s agent, Andrew Zack of The Zack Company.  It’s the story of how the discovery of an obscure pulp magazine sends the novel’s hero in search of the Enigma Club, supposedly located on a forgotten island in the Gulf of Mexico.

What he discovers is a land forsaken by time–Cayo Arcana, an island forgotten by the world for more than sixty years–where the pulps are still alive.  The Enigma Club is a haven for adventurers, explorers, heroes, starlets, scientists (mad and otherwise), warriors and spies, all members of a classic gentlemen’s club created by and for all the pulp archetypes from the Golden Age of Adventure.

THE ENIGMA CLUB recreates the pulp era of the ’20s and ’30s, and also makes an impossible tale and the impossible locale very real and almost interactive, integrating artifacts–photos, sidebars, excerpts from fictional books and pulps, telegrams, and even vintage postcards–to create a world that the reader feels could possibly exist.

Wornom’s original intent with THE ENIGMA CLUB was to include a sample pulp story for each of the Club’s charter members, as published between 1911 and 1953 in the Club’s pulp, The Enigma Club All-Adventure Magazine.  However, the novel became too long, so he included only one story, “Sky-Gods of Ixtamal,” to represent the themes inherent with the pulp era: adventure, wonder, lost races, fantastic technologies, and everyday characters who embody the heroic ideal.

Two other stories were already finished, and the first of these, “In the Mountains of Frozen Fire,” is a tale of Commander Denis Cushing, Agent M4, whom he created as a cross between James Bond, Artemus Gordon and G-8.  His inspiration for the story was a painting by Frank Frazetta, The Frost Giants, with a little Lovecraft and a lot of Robert E. Howard thrown in.  Wornom’s goal was to tell a period story, using the tropes of Howard, Lovecraft and traditional spy fiction, while also serving up a dose of 21st Century humor–along the lines of Indiana Jones meets SNL.

“In the Mountains of Frozen Fire” will be published in the July/August 2013 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

You can order copies here: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/current.htm

The second completed story is “Hot Time at Bad Penny’s,” a tale of founding member Bucky Sniggles-Wooten—charmer, adventurer, and accomplished cad.  It’s a saucy story of deadly gangsters, speakeasies, and super-science run amok.   Wornom’s goal with this was to show today’s readers what the pulps’ saucy or spicy stories were all about, while also playing with some of the tropes of big city pulp stories (with a tip of the hat to ERB, Amazing Stories, and the classic Fleischer Superman cartoons).  It is currently being considered for publication at F&SF.


ABOUT THE WRITER IN HIS OWN WORDS:

ERB and A Princess of Mars were my primary influences when I decided to become a writer.

Burroughs showed me that a writer is born in his heart, and that even a pencil sharpener salesman could tell stories of extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances that could enthrall generations of readers.  Once I read A Princess of Mars, I knew that I wanted to tell stories that could make people believe in worlds undreamed of. 

Rusty is what my friends call me, but Harlan Ellison once yelled at me in a workshop, “Nobody’ll read anything by a guy named Rusty!   It’s a kid’s name!”   So Rus was born, even though my given name, Howard, was used when my novella, “Puppy Love Land,” was published in the April, 1996 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.   The story was later nominated as Best Novella on the Preliminary Ballot for the Horror Writers of America awards.   I was also the pseudonymous author of Spelljammer: The Ultimate Helm, Dungeon of Fear, and Castle of the Undead, all published by TSR Books way back in the dim, dark ‘90s.   Spelljammer made the Waldenbooks bestseller list . . . for a month.   Since 1983, I’ve been published in such magazines as Omni, Premiere, Gauntlet, and Storyboard, and in newspapers and regional magazines, and contributed to The Stephen King Companion.   I’ve participated in writing workshops with Ellison, Brian Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, and Kate Wilhelm.   A spec teleplay got me in the door at Star Trek: The Next Generation, where I pitched story ideas four times.   I’ve also acted on the Discovery Channel in The New Detectives, although I was never credited.   (Somehow, though, Buddy the Beagle got a credit.)   I live in Virginia with my wife and a large, furry family.

TO CONTACT ME:

MY AGENT:
Andrew Zack
The Zack Company

Today On Amazing Stories

  • News
  • June 30, 2013
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Today on Amazing Stories:

News Roundup – including an uncomfortably large number of articles dealing with bias, racism, harassment and BS that just has got to stop!, Time Machine roundup of the week’s most popular posts, and Mark A. Garlick’s artwork featured in this week’s IAAA Gallery.

Find all this and more here.

Mindy Newell: It’s Personal, Not Business.

Newell Art 130225From Wikipedia: Critics have generally received Ender’s Game well. The novel won the Nebular Award for best novel in 1985, and the Hugo for best novel in 1986, considered the two most prestigious awards in science fiction. Ender’s Game was also nominated for a Locus Award in 1986. In 1999, it placed #59 on the reader’s list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels. It was also honored with a spot on the American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens.” In 2008, the novel, along with (it’s sequel) Ender’s Shadow won the Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors an author and specific works by that author for lifetime contribution to young adult literature. Ender’s Game was ranked at #2 in Damien Broderick’s book Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010.

Not too shabby.

The announcement by DC that Orson Scott Card (author of Ender’s Game and its sequel) will be writing a Superman story to be included in an upcoming anthology has burst into a firestorm of controversy on the net and in newspapers such as The Hollywood Reporter (“Ender’s Game’s Orson Scott Card’s Anti-Gay Views Pose Risk for Film,” February 20, 2013), not only because of Mr. Card’s publicly-stated negative opinions on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, but because Mr. Card sits on the Board of Directors for the non-profit National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Established in 2007 to work against the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States, NOM contributed $1.8 million to the passage of “Prop 8” in California, which prohibited same-sex marriage in California. (The amendment was in force until United States District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker overturned it in August 2010, ruling that it violated the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the United States Constitution. His decision has been appealed, and the ruling has been stayed.) NOM also opposes civil union legislation and gay adoption.

Last week Michael Davis’s Brokeback Bastard here on ComicMix asserted not only DC’s right to hire Mr. Card despite the widespread outrage, but Michael’s opinion that efforts to get DC to renege their offer to Mr. Card, i.e., fire the bigot!, will fail, because, DC sees this, a la The Godfather, as “business, not personal.” Why? Because, to quote Michael, “This is a win – win for DC. They get a pretty good writer and massive publicity so why fire the guy? When the book comes out they will get another round of colossal exposure so like I said, why fire the guy?”

He’s right about that. Any publicity, so the pundits say, is good publicity. (I get the sentiment, but it’s not really true. Just ask Elliot Spitzer about his hooker friend, or Paul Ryan about his marathon time.)

This is what I wrote in response to Michael’s column:

Well, I understand the business side of it. Orson Scott Card is a prolific and popular science fiction writer whose Ender’s Game won the Nebula and the Hugo, and whom DC is betting will bring in lots of $$$$$. And I understand the “high moral ground” that Michael and Dan and John (Dan and John are respondents who took issue with Michael’s viewpoint) are arguing above: judge the guy on his writing, not on his personal views. However, Card’s views are not personal in that he is a member of the Marriage Is Only Between A Man And Woman Board, (I was too lazy at the time to look up the name of the organization) or whatever the hell it’s called. He has publicly stated that gay men and women should be ostracized and worse.

Superman is an icon. Superman stands for justice for all. Superman stands for the American dream. Superman stands for the pursuit of happiness. Superman stands for Truth. Card does not stand for justice for all. Card does not stand for the American dream. Card does not stand for the pursuit of happiness. Card does not stand for Truth.

Hatred and bigotry is rampant again in this country. Just look at what’s happening in Congress. The total blockage of Obama’s proposals, the continuation of the birthers and their lies, the about-to-be sequestration of our economy is all about the hatred of our first black President. Operative Word Is Black.
 Hiring Card to write an American icon is disgusting because Card is against everything the American dream stands for. That’s my opinion, plain and simple.

Though, as I said, I understand the business behind DC’s decision, I’m also so fucking tired of the “anything for a buck” crap that’s so damn rampant these days. It’s not just in business. It manifests itself everywhere. For instance:

I worked for many years at my local hospital. Across-the-board layoffs were scheduled. Instead of protesting the lay-offs, my union said that any employee who had lost his or her job could “bump” a junior employee. In other words, take the junior employee’s job and leave him or her out in the cold. I found this despicable. The union’s job, im-not-so-ho, was to protect all employees, not just do a “run-around” to solve the problem.

I could never take another person’s job. “It’s not right,” I said. Most of my co-workers mouthed the words, but when push-came-to-shove, most of those who were on the lay-off list did “bump” the one below them. And what was worse, being a small, community hospital, the “bumpers” knew the “bumpees.”

Et tu, Brutus?

Yeah, I know. “Oh, grow up, Mindy.” “Who are you, Pollyanna?” “People gotta do what they gotta do.”

It really sucks that I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore.

But like I said, I get it.

Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.

Go to the mattresses.

It’s business, not personal.

BUT GOD DAMN IT…

IT’S SUPERMAN!

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

 

 

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