May15

SF Becomes Reality: Survivor

on May 15th, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Deep Thoughts

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have always loved the television show Survivor.  I started watching it way back in the first season, turning it on by accident and getting sucked in right away.  It was the first reality game show and it’s still the best. As people flocked to the movie theaters to see The Hunger Games, I was glued to the television to see who won the title of Sole Survivor.

While The Hunger Games is a reality game show of Survivor on steroids, it is by no means the first of this type of story.  Plenty have pointed out the disturbing parallels between The Hunger Games and the Japanese story of children battling to the death, Battle Royale. I’ve not read the Japanese book, yet, but the film is worth your time (warning: it’s very bloody).  Long before, though, we had Stephen King’s tale, The Running Man (made into a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but not a very good one).  Go further back and you get the schlock flick, Deathrace 2000.  In fact, you’ll find plenty of examples throughout prose and television of this same basic idea — battling to the death as televised entertainment.

It’s a weird aspect of science fiction that sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the crazy worlds we create become reality.  Cell phones were predicted in Star Trek’s communicators.  Geo-sync orbiting satellites were famously described by Arthur C. Clarke long before they were a reality.  And then we have Survivor.

Now, thankfully we haven’t degenerated to the point that the contestants are trying to physically harm or kill each other, but they are trying figuratively to cut each other’s throats in order to win one million dollars.  As a writer, I love Survivor because you get to see human behavior under extreme stress and paranoia.  Writing action-adventure fantasy, these are things I encounter all the time.  Heroes and heroines, by definition, live under extreme stress.  And unlike other “reality” shows, Survivor is not set up to mimic reality.  Nobody thinks this is real life.  But it is real people stuck in a real game.

Furthering the fascination is the fact that once they reach the jury level (where contestants voted out don’t go home but become part of the jury that will vote for who wins), the jurors are sequestered to a mini-resort known as the Ponderosa.  Online, you can see short videos following contestants from the moment they’re voted off to their first jury sitting.  You see them emerge from the game and discover their humanity again.  Two people who hated each other, lied to each other, and back-stabbed each other in the game, often find that, out of the game, they get along wonderfully and become lifelong friends.

It’s a happier ending than any of the fictions usually provide, and perhaps that says something better about us as humans.

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May08

Expectations and Cabin In The Woods

on May 8th, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Movies, Books, The Way of the Black Beast

This is not going to be a review of the movie, though I will quickly say that the movie is awesome, wonderful fun for anybody who likes Joss Whedon’s work as well as horror films.

What this post concerns is expectations.

See, over at The Eclectic Review podcast I give a lot of movie reviews.  Now, one surefire way to kill a film is to make me think I’m going to be seeing one type of movie and give me another one instead.  Yet, even as I type this, I can think of quite a few films that successfully pull off this switcheroo.  The key to success is in laying the proper groundwork so that when the true nature of the film is revealed, the audience is not taken by complete surprise.  I should be able to look back and think, “Oh, of course.  That was going on the whole time.”

In Cabin in the Woods, you might think as you’re sitting in the theater that you are in for a horror film.  But really, the movie is a horror film trapped inside a science-fiction/fantasy story.  Whedon handles this by not hiding it at all.  The opening scenes of the movie let the audience in on the concept at large (even though the details are kept secret for some fun later).  It works because I’m not really led down the wrong path, even if the view is a bit obscured.

This, of course, holds true in writing as well.  It’s actually more important because the length of a novel lends itself to being easily invested in one set of thoughts for a long time.  There are many ways to deal with this, but I always prefer the straight-forward method.

In The Way of the Black Beast, I approached it much as Joss Whedon does in Cabin in the Woods.  The opening chapter is designed to set up the proper expectations – that this is indeed a fantasy novel with magic and a sword-wielding heroine, but that there are also blues musicians and a formerly civilized, technologically advanced society.  This is crucial because much later in the book, Malja and her group are in a jeep driving around.  The only way for the reader to buy into that kind of thing is to have the proper expectations laid out early on.

Of course, not all books (or films) have to approach it right from the start.  Alfred Hitchcock notoriously led his audience to believe that Janet Leigh was the protagonist of Psycho, investing a lot of screen time into her character and story.  But he used this to great effect by killing her halfway through the movie.  It jolted and shocked the audience.  At this point, when others start searching for her and Norman Bates must cover up what he’s done, the movie shifts its focus.  This kind of playing with expectations works for two main reasons: 1) though the character viewpoint is shifted, the genre does not, and 2) Alfred Hitchcock is extremely talented.  Not everyone could pull off the same trick using the same script and actors.

In the end, for me, expectations play a vital role in guiding an audience toward the goals the artist desires to reach.  If done right, I reduce my workload later on, and the reader actually fills in all kinds of details based on those expectations.  I can play with those details to reinforce the ideas or jolt the reader with the opposite of the expected.  As long as it’s earned and doesn’t violate the overall story as it was set up, it should work.  But if you pick up a book expecting fantasy and instead got a historical romance, that would be where the problem lies.

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May01

The Way of the Brother Gods Cover Reveal

on May 1st, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Books, News, Books, The Way of the Brother Gods

Book 3 of The Malja Chronicles is coming out in just a few short weeks (if I can move fast enough).  So, here’s the cover art, once again done brilliantly by Lynn Perkins.

 

The Way of the Brother Gods Cover

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Apr24

Survival Story? Think Tom Hanks

on April 24th, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Books, After The Crash, Books, Movies

I’ve written a lot about influences on various aspects of The Malja Chronicles, but now that I have some other material out there, I finally can branch out and discuss other cool things.  After The Crash is a science-fiction survival tale about a tourist pilot coerced into smuggling a couple of aliens and a human scientist onto an untouched planet.  As the title implies, something goes wrong, they crash, and now they have to survive.

I did a lot of research for this novel both in the biology/geology for the world-building as well as in survival skills for the story.  Fascinating stuff that I’ll be sure to discuss down the road.  Today, however, I’m going to talk about a movie that I found very influential and inspiring for this book — Cast Away.

Cast Away is a film starring Tom Hanks and directed by Robert Zemeckis about a man who survives a plane crash only to spend the next four years of his life on a deserted island.  It’s a fantastic film on many levels but two key elements in particular helped my story along.

The first is a bit of structural work. In Cast Away, the first half of the film is spent detailing Hanks’s current world — busy work, family life, various things that surround him with the life, noise, food, and everything that makes up our modern world.  In other words, all the things the story is going to take away from him when he’s on that island.  This was perfect for my purposes, so I did what any admiring creator does.  I stole it.

Sort of.

I actually start After The Crash with a glimpse of Fiona Quinn, my tourist pilot, far in her future, so the reader has a sense of what she will become.  Then we zip back to before the crash and spend a bit of time establishing the world she will lose.  Like Cast Away, I don’t shy from taking my time here.  The more detailed Fiona’s reality is, the greater her loss will be. When we finally get to the crash and its aftermath, if I’ve done my job well, the reader will have that same sense of strangeness that Tom Hanks portrays so well in his film.

The other aspect of Cast Away that had an influence on my book was more on the character level.  In the movie, Hanks makes it back to civilization and is struck (once again) by the strangeness of this different world — only now it’s in reverse with the modern world being the strange one and his island life being the accepted reality.  He then has to figure out how to live. Fiona has it a bit harder.  She spends far longer alone than Hanks’s four years, and as a result, the question of whether to return to civilization or not weighs far greater.

Of course, she goes through a lot more than Hanks did.  She’s on a planet filled with wildlife and danger — not to mention two alien creatures and human scientist, each with their own agendas.  And she’s determined to uncover the mystery of why she was brought into this mess in the first place.  I’ll simply say that things are not as simple as they appear.

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Apr17

Women Kickin Butt — Buffy

on April 17th, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Deep Thoughts

It’s about time I address this lady of lethality.  To say that Buffy kicks butt is an understatement of epic proportions. Truly. Not just because Joss Whedon created a character (and a series) so powerful that even if you are not a fan, even if you’ve never seen an episode or read the comic or knew there was a movie originally, you still know of Buffy and that she is a vampire slayer. Buffy is a cultural icon, and one of the precursors to the current Urban Fantasy craze.

I won’t bore you with a rehash of what the show is about. You probably already know (and if you don’t, there are plenty of references). What I want to point out is that she, in fact, was not a simple vamp-slayer nor was she some grrrrl power wannabe. She was actually, and quite simply, a superhero. All the characteristics of a comic book superhero are within her. She is super-human in her physical abilities, she has side-kicks, she saves the world (many times), and she is always right.

That last point is an amazingly overt yet strangely subtle one.  Overt because it happens almost every episode. Something is threatening lives or friends or whatever and Buffy says what should be done, but the rest of the Scoobies ignore, dismiss, or doubt her. They try some other method, fail, and rely on Buffy to save the day.  Which she does, because she loves her friends — they are her family — and because she’s a superhero.  Superheroes help those in need, even when it hurts.

But the whole “being right” thing is quite subtle, too. Never does she point out that she was right, and often she doubts herself enough to not realize she is right. And never do the Scoobies pick up on their pattern of behavior at a conscious level (though they all act as if on some deeper level, they always expect her to be right and to swoop in to save the day).

I could talk about Buffy for a long time, but really, it’s probably all been said.  I suppose I just want to thank Joss Whedon for creating Buffy and sharing her with the world. There’s no doubt in my mind that the current crop of kickin’ butt women we see in books and film and TV owe a lot to her. Even my own dear creation, Malja, must acknowledge that Buffy provided a new scope to the female superhero, one that will reach further into our culture than any of us realize.

 

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