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14 February 2015 at 05:42 #38000
Thanks for kind words, puro.
14 February 2015 at 05:38 #37999@bluesqueakpip Good points, all. There certainly are problems of supply . . .
13 February 2015 at 01:03 #37986@millymittens You know, it may even be that the enormous support network now all keyed into the internet — discussions all over the place, fan conventions, magazines and magazine-like sites, a whole parallel Whoniverse on tumblr, etc. — may make it easier for the writers to be more complex in their writing, since a slowpoke like me can mooch around on the net and find interpretations of bits of the show that went by me too fast, or that connect up to older shows that I don’t remember or didn’t see — where was I? — yeah, we can “catch up” if we need to instead of staying lost and wandering away disappointed. That makes us, in roundabout way, part of the creative process that keeps this whole shebang running.
Probably not, but maybe so? More likely, I think, than the idea of Moffat and crew scouring the massive amount of fan talk and output to get a better grip on “what the fans want”, since a) there isn’t enough time in the world to do that, particularly when like Moffat you are writing TWO highly demanding shows, DW and Sherlock, and b) strongly creative people usually walk into a job with plenty of ideas of their own and the confidence to execute them and see how people like them, rather than the other way around.
12 February 2015 at 19:08 #37972@millymittens Oh, and you’re welcome! I didn’t catch that unlocking of Gallifrey either. I depend a lot on internet conversations about Who to keep me in the loop — really great resource!
12 February 2015 at 19:06 #37971@millymittens I get very restless with Old Who these days (though I loved it back then), but looking in on Tom Baker’s reign could never be a mistake! Wonderful, quirky, completely idiosyncratic work, and useful for catching the homages to Baker that Capaldi is dropping into his performance in NuWho.
As for the fans — I dunno, I was a fan of “old” who, now can’t stick with it, but love and admire NuWho as a brilliant example of pop culture at its best and great fun to watch and discuss. Fans of the older shows sometimes sound as if they’re still action addicts and find the newer emphasis on character and depth annoying, but that may just be the heavier emphasis that tends to be put on negative comments about NuWho, and the weirdly lunatic fixation of some on hating Steven Moffat for not being, well, the writer they think they would be in his place, I guess, instead of who he is.
12 February 2015 at 18:19 #37968@IAmNotAFish — Yikes! Really?! Don’t know whether to laugh or cry . . . cry, probably, because probably not one in a thousand viewers of that show have bothered to read Dumas’ books, let alone discover his interesting ancestry.
12 February 2015 at 18:07 #37967If they do have a Big Red Button, can all thirteen Doctors be far behind? Trust the universe, right? It will provide.
12 February 2015 at 18:04 #37966@flirtingdinosaur You’re welcome! Here we are with more than six months to go, and there are still nuggets of Who stuff popping up all over. Never know what you’re going to find . . .
12 February 2015 at 09:30 #37961Can’t end the world before we get DW Series 9, all of it. Not. Allowed. Then they can blow up whatever the hell they want to, IMO. One question: how could alien beings out there in the whatever have developed their taste for human flesh, without any humans to eat so far? And how would any of us normal (?) people know whether these CERN scientists et al “know what they’re doing” or not? You can know what they *say* they’re doing, when asked, but how many of us really get what their words mean? You can hardly write any kind of hard SF any more (unless it’s about fancy notions of futuristic weapons and war, like video games), because even if you do read up on the “hard” science you need for your story, and even if you understand the jargon and the concepts, it would take you an absolutely brilliant example of popularized science, per a treatise or textbook or a TV show, to make what you know (or think you know) understandable to a smart reader; which would pretty much kill your story as a story.
We are always just hanging by a thread anyway, thanks to the vagaries of Mother Nature (some mother!). If it blows up, it blows up. Piff, poff, been and gone. And yes, a glass of wine (or whatever you fancy) is a perfectly appropriate response to a news item like this one.
12 February 2015 at 09:12 #37960Ah, that was fun! Thanks for the link! Not just a pretty face, then, hmm?
12 February 2015 at 09:03 #37959Death . . . Maybe it helps to be young, to feel it as such a sensual matter as expressed in this beautiful speech. I feel a death these days as a subtraction, an absence, a door firmly closed in my face. It wouldn’t occur to me that the dead person is now deprived of earthly delights, but more that we (the bereaved) are all deprived of the sharing of those delights and quotidian experiences with that particular person from now on. That person (most recently, my mother-in-law, whose deathbed I attended) has, as I perceive it, stepped into that other room that’s a mystery to us, the living. Her adventures continue — or they don’t. Mine do, but don’t have her in them any more. Sometimes it’s like going down stairs in bad lighting, and there’s a step missing: you lurch, grab the bannister, give the moment of breathless panic its due, and then continue your descent. Heavier, for a while.
TV fiction generally gets nowhere near this experience, partly because that heaviness, the lingering effects, would weigh the story down and drag it too far from successful “entertainment” norms. But I think we’re seeing an opening up of those norms a bit lately, maybe because our population is aging; so we get a spate of series about death (zombies, inexplicable returns, the destroyed lives of the parents of vanished children, struggles for immortality, documentaries about real deaths and illnesses, etc.).
Buffy was way ahead of its time with this; but then, some vampire stories have been ways of thinking out loud about death, loss, and immortality, I guess.
12 February 2015 at 08:24 #37958@scaryb — “Stunt casting”, well put; but sometimes making a radical break isn’t (or is much more than) just a “gimmick”. What some would regard as a “stunt” others — many others! — could see as a daring reach into new territory that could delight more viewers than it would offend, and that could bring new energy into the show and its fandom. The creative team made a massively successful decision to drop the “my boyfriend is a Time Lord” line for exploration of a subtler, more complex relationship between an ancient alien and a young human woman. This move put off a lot of young fans probably not into that kind of complexity yet, but re-engaged older fans who’d drifted off *looking* for more maturity and complexity, as well as refreshing the show tremendously which it definitely needed. On the evidence, I am happy to trust the team to make other decisions on the basis of what’s good for the show and its enormous and varied audience rather than catering to whatever ideological skirmishes are going on in the (real) world at the time.
My bet is that they’re going to need to go way wide in choosing Capaldi’s successor. IMO, nobody can *follow* Capaldi; they’ll need someone talented and compelling enough to take off like a rocket and blaze their own unique trail in no uncertain terms; in other words, the very best talent and the most compelling presence they can find, regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, fitness to run a marathon, and so on.
I trust them to get it right — assuming they’re smart enough to start off by broadening the diversity of the writing team as well. I think they’re edging up on getting that smart.
10 February 2015 at 01:17 #37925I guess I’m too damn old to have the memories a person my age *should* have. At any rate, I watched from way back but hthe first DW I remember is watching Tom Baker. My husband and I used to be avid watchers of Baker’s stint as the Doctor, although we would often turn to each other and say, “Why are we watching this program — it’s goofy!” Of course we watched it because it was wonderful, literally and figuratively. I don’t think I noticed when the show was canceled, tuned out NuWho someplace in Tennant, and fell head first into Series 8, because a) Capald and Coleman, b) a whole series bouncing all over the place with a Doctor taking his time figuring out all the kinds of people he *isn’t*, and c) some great writing/acting/whatever, which is not that easy to come by on TV.
So I guess I’m making memories *now*; hey, can’t complain. Someday I’ll go back and try the rest of NuWho; that’s what impatience does to you. It makes you go back and do things *again*, because you zoomed by too fast (and, possibly, too dismissively) the first time.
10 February 2015 at 00:30 #37924Oh, look it — answers to some DW questions (leading to lots more confusion, thanks so much — ) (and also provocation) (Jesus, Moffat is so damn clever . . . all I can do is shake my head in admiration):
http://www.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/2m7im3/steven_moffat_qa_for_dwm_480/
Hope that works.
8 February 2015 at 19:06 #37901@serahni — I’ve enjoyed Pratchett’s take on Death as a character too, and my favorite of the books is Small Gods. I’ve got the whole bunch and read one at random from time to time, just because I love Pratchett’s narrative voice — smart, cheeky, and kind, among other qualities. Haven’t been able to get into the new ones at all, though. I clearly need to give them another try — can you recce any one in particular? I haven’t been keeping track.
8 February 2015 at 18:59 #37900Yes, fun — jeez, the contortions these guys go through, but how could it be otherwise with a show about a very old adult male alien who keeps changing faces over 50 yrs (minus the gap, of course). The continuity issue is a lost cause, at least for me — I don’t even bother. I did see all of Tom Baker’s years, and some of the rest, but I can’t keep track, and life doesn’t permit going back and watching all of it again, so . . .
Anyway, that plus the tension between a show for kids/family viewing and a show for people who have grown up and who want at least some underpinnings of adult character and behavior sabotages the whole idea of continuity forever, seems to me. Just gotta go with the flow, or grump out because hey, he was married couple times and there were some kids he never refers to, so he must have been a sexual being all along except no but sort of yes but what about pining for Rose/Amy/whomever and flirting like mad in NuWho but now he says “That’s done,”but the background tension is thick enough to cut with a bread knife, so . . . ? Whert the fook?
I think I like these guys’ attitude best: gibes and laughter and twisty escapes, and why not? Itsa TV!
Oh yes, and “Lost”? Loved it at first, because it had some actual middle-aged characters portrayed by middle-aged people, instead of a fantasy airplane full of pretty young things (though of course there was a preponderance of same). When it became apparent that every single question was just going to lead to another question, I backed off, but it was great fun for a season or two.
8 February 2015 at 18:39 #37899@purofilion — Oh Godddddd. The idea of Stephanie Myers for *anything* makes my stomach churn. The Idiocracy has spoken, and now nobody can shut it up . . .
As for the importance of place, landscape, and breathing room, yes, I’ve felt this. Wearing my writer’s hat for a minute, let me say that as someone born and raised in Manhattan and writing stories and comics (self illustrated; I liked drawing horses), I started writing moody, thriller-ish fiction set in the streets and alleyways I knew as a kid. It was all pretty derivative, which is typical of beginners, nothing special, and when I went off to Nigeria to teach for a couple of years, I was writing a Western.
But the landscape of Nigeria just blew me right out of my socks. I was lucky, got sent to the interior of the Western Region, which is high, dry plateau country, volcanic rock and red, red earth. When I got home again, I literally could not get comfortable in New York: no space, no sky, too many pinched, pasty faces — just NO, not any more. When I could, I escaped to the Southwest — space! Sky! Darker-skinned people, even “Anglos” like me due to the strength of the sun here.
I can’t say that I started to write here; I’d been writing for years. But this place opened up the creative seam that I mined for four books, a futuristic, feminist epic-thing, that it took 25 yrs + to complete. And that vampire book — that project began as a single story, set back east, but when did a driving tour of the Painted Desert and the Canyonlands north and west of us, I was looking down from a canyon rim at a red rock spire called “Spider Rock” and thought, “This landscape is laid open by erosion for us to look at and see deeply into the geologic past; I want to bring my vampire out here — an ancient creature in an ancient landscape — and see what happens.” That whole book became about getting W out here and cutting him loose.
And yes, of course it’s all about music too — it’s not an accident that part of the cutting loose process is a night at the Santa Fe Opera, Puccini under the stars of this huge, high sky, not music from here, but music brought here and also cut loose.
And, to go back to the beginning, I suppose it’s worth noting that Stephanie Myers was clearly inspired by the dim and misty landscape of the Pacific Northwest . . . though I’m at a loss regarding any musical vein in her awful books.
6 February 2015 at 17:35 #37843@Barbara Lefty — well, a Doctor who ran his mouth off along the lines of Tucker would certainly put an end to recent discussions of the Doctor’s “asexuality” (or not!), I should think.
Meanwhile, for your delectation (and at a tasty tangent to our main subject(s)):
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-31159898
Guid grief! I’ll have that )(&*^&)_(+_(*%%## tangerine now, thanks!
6 February 2015 at 11:38 #37840@jimthefish — okay, got it.
Loved “Kavalier and Clay”, Chabon’s first big hit. I was one of the kids who bought the comics in those heady days of wild expansion in the industry . . .
6 February 2015 at 09:01 #37837Oh my Gord — anybody seen this before? Cracked me up, still picking up pieces of self from floor —
6 February 2015 at 08:44 #37836@purofilion — Wasn’t “The Collector” the one with — was it Terrence Stamp as the kid who kidnaps a woman in his van and keeps her locked up so he can admire her? Wonderful, creeeeeppyyyy movie. Hmmmm. Maybe not Stamp; but I can’t remember Stamp at all in his young days on film — too beautiful in that slightly feotal, youthie way, made no impression on me. But now that he’s seasoned out into something *truly* beautiful, he’s a joy to watch — “The Limey” is wonderful. Also, to return to SF, in “The Adjustment Bureau”. His face is not expressive, as Capaldi’s is; doesn’t need to be. With Stamp, I just want to stare as if his face were some rare mask from the wilds of Peru or Old Europe.
Well, I have this, uh, this thing about beautiful old guys; it feels related, somehow, to the Japanese aesthetic called “wabi sabi”, meaning a meditative appreciation of beat-up, battered objects as opposed to the new and shiny. I am a natural wabi sabist. Give me the rusty whatnot over the brand-new version from the hardware store, every single time. I would make a lousy Time Lord — control is not my thing. I don’t even believe in the reality of control, actually. I am a Time aficionado, maybe. I gravitate toward the march and the marks of time. Yeah, Michael Gambon in “Fortitutde” is another — what a crease-fest of a face, what a shambling wreck of a frame! I just go all melty and smile like a fond idiot, it’s absurd. Women too — Ursula LeGuin is utterly gorgeous in her old age (80’s now, brain scalpel sharp and tongue gives no quarter to idiots).
Oh, off-topic (movies, not TV series), and it’s late here . . . time to toddle.
6 February 2015 at 08:25 #37835@purofilion — best of Woody Allen for me is “High Crimes & Misdemeanors” I think — Martin Landau at his wonderful best (his other best is playing Bela Lugosi to Johnny Depp’s Ed Wood in “Ed Wood” — gorgeous and sad).
5 February 2015 at 23:50 #37826@jimthefish I watched an episode labeled SO3, episode O4 last night, and there are two more episodes in SO3, and then a couple more SO’s, so it looks like more than one series — but short ones, some 2-parters, some individual stories, usually about 6 in a bunch. There are a couple more SO’s to go, probably 15-18 episodes all told, so it’s a solid handful at least. Quite enjoyable, apart from a fairly heavy-handed insistence in the dialog that the paranormal stuff is explainable despite the fact that for the most part, as presented, it’s nothing of the kind.
I’ve spotted a stray thing called “Afterlife” on the same site, and comments from a few people who saw it and liked it. This is where I’m finding these is YouTube:
Plus others, lots to explore.
@purfilion Would that be the Fowles book called, I think, “The Magician” or “The Tower”, something like that — or “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, which (as both film and book) was quite a hit at the time, as I recall?
4 February 2015 at 05:21 #37799@purofilion — yep, that seems to be what they’ve done; SO annoying.
4 February 2015 at 05:18 #37798@purofilion — welcome, of course.
I read “The Lovely Bones” because I thought it was an interesting “afterlife” idea, but the novel was the worst bait-and-switch job I have ever encountered. That interesting idea turned out to be a mask for another drearily plodding “exploration” of American suburban life, not just in the regular world but *after death too and presumably forever* — good God, what a HORRIBLE thought! I ended up flinging the damn thing across the room, and by god I’d fling it again!
But the movie — holy moly, was that a *gorgeous*, inventive, triumphant piece of film making! It drove me all Malcolm Tucker (only inside my own head, no psychological maiming of anybody but maybe me resulted) when critics and others started whining about how the “fantasy elements” spoiled the movie for their teeny tiny shrunken tangerine pudding-f**king brains.
Just Tucci making that mad rush up the stairs — I’ve never felt ruthless lizard-brain menace projected so forcefully on a movie screen, not ever. It was amazing. A brilliant rescue of a deeply mediocre book, IMO.
4 February 2015 at 01:57 #37793puro — Here’s a thing about Fortitude:
Worth a look, maybe more. Stanley Tucci is no slouch either (did anybody see him in the film version of The Lovely Bones? Jeez — gorgeously crazy!).
4 February 2015 at 01:50 #37792@purofilion — Wow, that sounds pretty awful! I got the episode-only boxed set of DVD’s, looking in now and then (between tax work) in order. I’d pass this set on to a worthy recipient and shell out for the same DVD’s in HD (which these are not), if I could find them. So far, all I can see is that there’s an HD set of Series 8 but it’s Blu Ray, which is not a technology that I have.
Them blowing off the fans with thoughtless junk commentaries is *not* a good sign for the future. Sheesh, it’s not as if there’s a dearth of highly informed fan-folks they could have discussed the flesh and bones of the episode with on camera — people who’d do it for free, out of love of the show. DW has not built its huge viewership with egregious sloppiness and disdain from the commercial side of the DW phenomenon, so far as I know. But great success does tend to carry the seeds of later, and often greater, failure — please not, in this case!!
4 February 2015 at 01:40 #37791@phaseshift — Farscape! I loved that show; it was deeply weird, visual wonderful, and obsessively relation-snippy, since the crew of — Moia? –not sure of the spelling now — spent a lot of episodes onboard (alien location shooting must be vastly expensive, and when they did it, they did it well). It was also *smart*, and the lead characters were grown-ups (mostly and most of the time) able to deal with complex plot-advancing situations and demands. Fresh faces, snappy scripts, lots of fun —
And then I started to notice something, because it was beginning to disturb me. In the later series, it seemed like almost every episode included or even revolved around extended scenes of torture. It got to me to such an extent that I finally stopped watching.
To be clear, I’m not saying that I consider myself above being entertained by torture scenes (if that were true, I could certainly never have developed a taste for Opera, would I). What bothered me was that I felt that an element of my own character that I consider borderline perverse and squirmy was being *catered to*, in a sly and then a very insistent way, by the creative team on Farscape (well, that element in me and in lots and lots of other viewers at the time — the show was popular). Everybody onscreen seemed to be having far too good a time running wildly painful chemicals, currents, sharp blades, deliberately horrible lies etc. through other characters’ bodies/brains/souls etc. while in pursuit of some MacGuffin or other.
Again, it could be partly a matter of money: torture scenes are dramatic, and they’re cheap; space battles and exploration of alien planets, probably less so. But . . . Anyway, if anybody here does go check out Farscape — and I loved it for a long time — I’d appreciate comments here about what you find in this department. It could be that I’m remembering it in a distorted or downright false way. Or maybe I am, or was back then, overly sensitive for some reason. The same aversion drove me away from “24”, of course, and I didn’t last long with Hannibal either, handsome as that production was. The Doctor is definitely my speed in this department, and thank goodness for him!
Broadchurch — bored me stiff. Everybody had exactly the secrets you’d imagine, and none of them were interesting as characters except for the self-outcast woman living by the beach, with her extreme background experience. Now I hear it’s courtroom drama, so I’m outta there again. Right now I’m indulging my long term interest in the paranormal and metaphysical, watching “Sea of Souls” and some good UK ghosty stuff categorized along with it (SOS is paranormal investigators at “Clyde University” in Glasgow).
3 February 2015 at 17:57 #37775Oooohhh, found something! Anybody else come across this yet?
Comment column is lovely! Looks as if the haters haven’t found it yet . . . and what’s this about death rays — ??
31 January 2015 at 22:45 #37712@purofilion Ozzies GO! See news story today about strong anti-austerity rally in Madrid, on behalf of a party bent on lifting austerity and taxing the rich, following on from the Greek win just now by the Left. Everybody but the US . . . alas. Not that you can tell much about the actual political leanings of this nation any more from our elections, which appear to have been almost totally corrupted by big money with worse to promised for 2016. Our major problem is that, after Occupy, nobody seems interested in serious disruption here any more, maybe because we’re starting to show some economic growth almost a decade after the collapse — growth which will, as usual here, mainly benefit the rich, with a few table crumbs for everybody else.
At least, that’s how it looks from here right now. But luckily, the US is not the world! So all the best, rebellious not-Time-Lords-just-decent-people of OZ!
31 January 2015 at 22:34 #37710@scaryb — Well, everybody who’s worked with Peter Capaldi and commented about it where I could find their comment uses some form of the phrase “a sweet, kind, gentlemanly guy”, so I don’t think he ever really had much of a chance as a Punk Rocker. Luckily for us, he made the right career choice . . . !
31 January 2015 at 03:27 #37697Oh, Lisa — books! Forgot. Right now, an anthology of mysterious and SFnal stories, “Young Woman in a Garden” by Delia Sherman; Vol. 2 of a YA fantasy series by an excellent author, Maggie Stiefvater, called “The Raven Cycle” (a modern day YA with an Arthurian theme); “Forty Days Without Shadow”, by Olivier Truc, a murder mystery set in Sami land; and a book my daughter in law sent me for Xmas, “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel, a post-collapse novel about a traveling theater and music troop coming up against a crazy religious leader.
All good, so I flit among them depending on where I left each one and whether I can find my place in it once it’s in my hands — old habits; I used to read this way when I was a kid, still do much of the time.
The last is one of those novels of ruin that’s written by a non-genre author (so far as I can tell) and published hardback by Knopf, so it’s been reviewed in places like the Boston Herald and the NYTBR as a real book, right; and since she’s a damn good writer the book made it to National Book Award Finalist status and is a national best seller. This is the kind of thing that makes top drawer genre writers grind their teeth with frustration, of course, because *without* the SF label this is what’s possible; *with* the SF label, your book hasn’t got a chance in Hell.
30 January 2015 at 23:54 #37696Fortitude has a “The Thing” vibe mixed with “The Strain” — you know the odd research lab probably trying to “weaponize” penguins or something — plus a grisly murder (poor Eccleston Doc, split down the middle), a boy who’s caught *something* from contact with woolly mammoth remains (I think?), and a murderous town sheriff and a “Governor” (? of what?) who’s bent on opening an ice hotel, like the famous one in wherever the hell that is. And a high level cop from “the mainland” (?) who has some theory that involves — wind chimes? And a short conversation about lutfiske.
I only know about it because I spotted an internet list of new UK shows coming up, and this thing was on it, so I looked. I’ll look again; then I’m done, unless it starts to either cohere, or shine with dialog and acting brilliance.
But hey, maybe I missed something here? I’m always happy to hear that something is better than I thought it was — unless it’s abysmally worse, of course, which can’t ever be ruled out in the land of television.
30 January 2015 at 19:25 #37689Anybody see “Fortitude” Ep 1 last night? Sound quality was awful (I had to turn it way up to make out lines in some scenes), visuals convincingly awful (I enjoy stories about the Arctic, but no way am I *ever* going up there, and hope *there* never comes down here no matter how crazy our climate shifts become).
30 January 2015 at 19:20 #37688@lisa — Wow, Geoffrey Palmer from *way* back — everybody’s seen him with his growly old cheek-flappy face in “As Time Goes By”, right, with Judy Dench? Others are familiar, but that one really jumped out at me.
30 January 2015 at 19:15 #37687Oh, hey, look at this:
http://factor-tech.com/feature/mathematics-inspires-doctor-scriptwriter-stephen-thompson-explains/
Who knew?!
28 January 2015 at 02:19 #37651The Snow Goose — god, so many years ago. So many fine books led me out into the world before I ever left home.
28 January 2015 at 00:39 #37648OoooowwwwwwWW! My, that’s low! Thanks . . .
27 January 2015 at 20:42 #37640No gun, god damn elephant won’t give it back to me.
Coffee shop = Figure and Grounds? Grounds for Divorce (oops, no, that’s gotta be a bar)?
Fair Grounds? Sheesh, my imagination seems to have been grounded today.
27 January 2015 at 19:37 #37638@barbaralefty — Oh, I like this working title! Why not?! But only if I don’t have to buckle down now and write his books and articles for him, the arrogant old bastard . . . I’m circling, slowly and so far without full commitment, around another story about W. There’s a band in it, in a coffee shop, middle aged guys who all have other jobs because they never made it as musicians (maybe a fiddler, guitar, drummer), and they come in Tuesday mornings and play in the background (yeah, they’re modeled on something local near the university, where I live). They call themselves “Rubbish Robots from the Dawn of Time” . . .
Glad you liked the book. I still like it pretty well, myself, truth be told.
25 January 2015 at 08:58 #37601@purofilion I just meant that Giles eventually gets into the action quite a bit, as I recall, instead of just being a “watcher”, plus lager developments like uni that I never went along for.
25 January 2015 at 00:31 #37593@purofilion Four double bass et al? Who’s gonna do the Laurel & Hardy dance? It won’t be the same without the Laurel & Hardy dance! Surely some faculty members can be found . . . No?
Aw, pity.
I haven’t watched BtVS in ages, but remember Giles and Buffy fondly. That girl got the best School Dad ever — no wonder she turned out so well! That’s parenting for you — you try to prepare them, and then you get to . . . watch . . . Well, a bit more in Giles’s case, but as I recall the situation was a little, ah, unusual. Them was the days . . .
24 January 2015 at 18:42 #37585Books — please add “Earth Abides”, 1949, George R. Stewart.
24 January 2015 at 18:37 #3758424 January 2015 at 03:01 #37568@pedant — well, most fanfic writers I’ve heard talk about their work are very quick to point out that they are not “authors” in the same way that the creators of their source materials are: “I’m a writer, but it’s just fanfic” is not an uncommon description. In fact, I’ve never come across a fanfic writer claiming to be an author at all — has anybody here? I only buzz around that area from time to time, and may well have missed such a happening, or a whole bunch of events. You don’t find their work for sale in the dealers’ rooms at conventions; they don’t sit at the autograph tables, and they rarely get invited to speak on panels unless those panels are about fanfic. I’ve heard lots more people title themselves “authors” and then add that their claim to own it is an unpublished original novel in a drawer that has never seen the critical light of day than call themselves “authors” of fanfic.
Just not seeing the “I am an author” being justified by some fanfic pages. That’s been my experience.
24 January 2015 at 02:52 #37567Also, on Atwood and her SF/not SF tales: she has taken both positions, but can be forgiven (or not) for waffling for fear of becoming tainted with genre cooties (“SF is inferior by definition,” per Sturgeon’s remark) and finding herself dissed for dabbling in that SF stuff (although dabbling it most certainly is not). Again, it’s a marketing issue: “mainstream” writing on her level gets admiring reviews in the broader media that help sales. SF written at similar levels gets reviewed in “Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine” and *maybe”, if you’re very lucky, somewhere in some best-of-the-year roundup somewhere, BUT also tends to deliver a readership of devoted SF fans that can bring respectable sales, even possible cross-over sales into mainstream, as with “Left Hand”. The issue of the “genre ghetto” never goes away (well, not so far, anyway), and if you’re making your living writing fiction, you’d best pay attention to such matters.
24 January 2015 at 02:45 #37566@lisa — medieval Europe/Japan sounds like a good game-concept for an historical war game; I wonder if there is one out there? Or something that uses elements adapted from both histories to create new battles for players? I’m not a gamer, no idea, but seems like a natural.
And yes, you do want some of both the gardening and the engineering approaches, and in some respects the length of a work has a lot to do with it. The more characters and situations a series gets under its belt, the more engineering is required just to avoid major inconsistencies, which to my mind accounts for some of the more stilted aspects of late-in-a-series books, at least as I remember them. I don’t read much in series these days, so things may have changed.
@arbutus — The Black Death! Have you read Connie Willis’s “Doomsday Book”? I take issue with some of it, but have to admit that by the end the story has become extremely moving and deep-feeling. And you are heartily hearted back re committing ship — one wishes not to trample over sensibilities, after all, but English is *such* a deliciously flexible and multi-layered language — ! There’s always a way around.
@IAmNotAFish — well, but wait a minute: Mike Bishop wrote a very good book called “Brittle Innings” in which Dr. F’s monster is involved in baseball. Mike did not invent the monster, but he invented a good story around the monster, so does that invalidate the work? Granted, Mike is an established author with numerous well-regarded books to his name, but suppose a newcomer had written this book? I just don’t see “invention” the way you do, I guess. Likewise, “Wide Sargasso Sea”: Rhys didn’t invent Bertha, but did invent her entire backstory, so — what does that make this very effective novel? To me, the Big Conversation goes on in incidents of call and response: “Frankenstein” is a call; “Brittle Innings” is a response, among many other responses, some of them fanfic (not written for the general public, critical response, and possible income). “Dracula” itself a response to the call of both Gothic lit of the time and the stimulus of Henry Irving’s performances as Mephistophiles, becomes the call for, among others, Anne Rice’s books, and so the Conversation continues — but there are many other responses at many levels. Do we want to stop Rice from writing her vampires because she didn’t invent them? Or Fred Saberhagen, for another example, for writing a charming little novel called “The Dracula Tapes”, giving Dracula’s p.o.v. on Stoker’s plot? I don’t see it.
23 January 2015 at 23:11 #37555@bluesqueakpip Which often translates into “It doesn’t fit our marketing categories”.
NotaFish — Got it, and good — if she got that far, that’s a triumph in itself, but it’s not quite what she wanted, right? But she well get it, by the sound of things.
But — ” . . . by the hand of the author herself”? Too limiting, IMO. If the author *doesn’t* get around to doing something like that, why not others — once copyright restrictions are gone, assuming we’re talking about fiction for commercial publication — so long as they don’t claim the name of the author as their own? Or let me put it this way: saying NO is a principled position of opposition, but it will not prevent the flowering of explosive seeds found in the original work in the gardens of others, whether into weeds or excellent blooms, and my position is that prevention is not desirable.
Mind you, I did once say “No” to a request by a fan to write her own stories about an SF character and world of mine. That was years ago. I was so much older then, I’m young than that now — and I regret my prohibition. I think it was a mistake, and I wish I had a fanfic fandom of my own for those books that I could play in and with others myself. So you could say that my position isn’t neutral to begin with, which I freely acknowledge.
23 January 2015 at 22:39 #37549NotaFish — sorry for your friend’s unhappy adventure, but yeah, things will turn out better if she stays with it. I’ve had the same experience over and over, notably with people taking film options and getting right put to the top level of decision-making — and *then* getting a thumbs down. Nerves of steel are highly recommended when creatives have to deal with the marketplace, which is full of nerves of spaghetti.
23 January 2015 at 22:35 #37547@purofilion Ah, well, that is the question, isn’t it? Except that I don’t think “should” really applies here. You’re either relaxed (or downright enthusiastic) about interpretation, or you’re, um, retentive, and can’t stand the idea of somebody straying from what you want them to get from a particular work of yours. The problem I see with the latter position is that creativity by its nature cannot be contained, on the one hand. A book or printed story is a machine. It translates a developed concept from my brain into the reader’s, by means of the reader’s performance art. When I read a page of print, I don’t get *exactly* the concept the author had in mind because of the (glorious) imprecision of language — her words won’t mean exactly the same thing as the meaning I construct from them in my own mind. I perform my version of her story in my head as I read, which is also a creative act, and it can easily lead to other creative acts consisting of me thinking new what-ifs about her characters and events. So as soon as her story is read, it starts to proliferate into as many internally performed versions as the story has readers. So “control” except in the broadest sense (“No, that character is NOT a version of Jar Jar Binks, you idiot, it’s my take on Edward Rochester!”) is literally (in every sense) and practically impossible.
And as culture rolls on through history and v.v., what readers bring to the page inexorably changes too, which changes the “meaning” of the text/machine for all but maybe academic specialists who keep some version of the original authorial intention alive (again, “Don Quixote/Man of la Mancha”, and all the old books being reinterpreted using this or that current theory of literary analysis).
Creativity — the readers’ as well as the writers’ — wins hands down, because stasis is not a sustainable state. As a writer I can “fix” my story in verbal amber, but time will unfix it, assuming I am lucky enough to write something that actually lasts a while: example, of course, LeGuin’s major works, among many others’. In fact, because she is a creative live wire, LeGuin has herself deliberately participated in this process, writing another Earthsea book to address reader concerns about the gender politics of the earlier ones, and coming back to “Left Hand” with a story in which default “he” is replaced by default “she” for the Gethenians, for ditto reasons. These changes, by the hand of the author herself, cast a new light of meaning on the earlier works. Greater love hath no writer — for her work and also in her regard for her readers.
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