people

Living inside a movie

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Tor.com guest blogger Don T. Careallthatmuch writes a ridiculous post suggesting that Pandora, the fictional planet that serves as a setting for the movie AVATAR is where people were meant to live.

Fun quote: “Isn’t this how we were meant to live, and might live again? Hunting the forest, leaping through the canopy, killing beasts, taming others, enacting meaningful rituals? It’s the same dream offered by Tolkien’s Middle-earth—to be peaceful, nature-bonded hobbits, quietly growing crops, smoking pipes, drinking ale and laughing. An alluring fantasy life to be sure. And one perhaps worth fighting for.”

Don left out “crapping in holes” but whatever. This reminds me of something I heard Spider Robinson say at the late, lamented NW Bookfest some years ago (I paraphrase from memory, of course). He said that he reads science fiction because he wants to read about societies of the future, advanced societies where he can imagine living. Fantasy readers, he assumed, were doing the same thing–which made them fools. The typical human in a pre-industrial Europe worked incredibly hard and was incredibly uncomfortable; he’d tried to live a self-sustaining farmer’s life, and it was a nightmare. Fantasy readers, he concluded, were idiots.

Never mind that many, many people do not read books because they’re daydreaming about living in the setting. Sure, I might imagine how cool it would be to fight like Aragorn, kicking monster ass and getting to be king at the end, but that doesn’t mean I’d walk through a portal marked “Middle Earth: Entrance Only.”

I think something that throws people about this is that these action movies are taking place in a wacky setting. If I read a crime novel, does that mean I want to have a knife fight with a junkie in an alley? Hell no. Do I want to drive an souped-up car across a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland? No and no again.

I enjoy the hell out of those sorts of stories, though. I may imagine myself standing alone on a bridge as the goblin warriors rush at me, or piloting a spaceship through a firefight, or confronting a vampire in it’s lair, but that’s part of enjoying an adventure story.

But to actually go there and do that? For real? Pass. And I think most sane people would agree.

At this point, let me tell you about a very good, very old friend of mine. At one point, he told me he was going to join the FBI. This was something of a surprise, because this was a guy who’d given up the chance to run his own martial arts school to pursue acting. He’d owned a bicycle repair business, repaired rental hardware for Lowe’s, produced documentaries and DVD extras, built movie sets, etc. But wear a suit and investigate people for the federal government? Where did that come from.

“The X-Files,” he said. Now, he knew it was a little ridiculous as he said it. He knew he couldn’t join the FBI to hunt aliens, but he’d enjoyed that show so damn much that he wanted to jump into it. (He cancelled his application midway through because he knew it was laughable, but still). There are scientists who were inspired by Star Trek, martial arts students who studied wu shu because of Jackie Chan, fencing students inspired by The Three Musketeers, kendo students inspired by Toshiro Mifune.

Yeah, there are people who love a story enough to try to make it part of their lives. But to give up everything and rush off to neverland? I look forward to Don’s future posts from the jungles of the Amazon. As for me, I’d consider it if it was an honest-to-god utopia and I could bring my wife and son. But probably not. I don’t hate my life that much, and I don’t want to crap in a hole.

It’s not “selling children”. It’s “selling parenting rights.”

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The (supposed) moral implications of selling children according to libertarians.

Having said that much, I’m sure you know exactly what you’ll find at the other end of that link.

Randomness for 12/29

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1) Tape measure superpowers. via sinboy

2) Blue Thundercats are only the most obvious uses for cgi. It’s also useful for turning sets into locations.

3) Romeo and Juliet by people who slept through English class. Hilarious. The text is fun, but listen to the audio news report, if you can. It’s not only wonderful, but it goes a little deeper than you might expect.

4) I’m supposed to be on a holiday media fast, but some things can’t be ignored: Is this Iran’s Second Revolution?

5) First link from James Nicoll: Most unsympathetic protagonist of 2009? The list is limited to protagonists who are supposed to be sympathetic, and Thomas Covenant has been awarded a lifetime achievement award and is no longer eligible.

6) Second link to James Nicoll: Rail travel in the U.S. Personally, I’d love to see more reliable, faster rail service in this country.

7) Sixth Pacific NW police officer dies of gunshot wounds in two months. First we had an office in Seattle shot to death on Halloween night. Then there were the four Lakewood officers. Now this. Law enforcement deaths are down from last year, nationally, but shooting deaths are up (most law enforcement deaths are auto-related). Condolences to his family and his fellow officers.

A holiday moment

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Because Christmas time is the time for weeping uncontrollably.

Randomness for 12/14

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1) So infuriating and depressing: What happened to Hope Witsell.

2) In a less awful note, Dominick Dunn: bestselling writer with appalling taste.

3) Comfortable interstellar travel

4) Terminator Offers Some Lessons for the Salvation of Your Novel

5) One thing that continually astonishes me about people is the way they leap to the defense of the powerful. Some seem to want to side with authority as a matter of habit. But before I could write about this–and about Dr. Peter Watts’s experience at the U.S./Canadian border–Jo Walton did it better than I ever could.

6) Frank Frazetta’s son smashes through the Frazetta museum with a backhoe to steal $20 million dollars worth of his father’s paintings. via James Nicoll

7) Joe Lieberman promises to filibuster health care reform. His current rational is that he’s against the expansion of Medicare. He had the opportunity to negotiate with Senators on this issue but refused to show up for those meetings. Of course, he previously supported the policy when he ran for VP. He doesn’t want to negotiate; he wants to obstruct. He’d previously opposed the public option for completely counterfactual reasons; in fact, he seemed about as knowledgeable on the subject as trolling conservative commenters on John Scalzi’s blog. Why did Connecticutters vote this asshole back in?

This again

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Why Science Fiction Is Dying & Fantasy Fiction Is The Future.

Fantasy author Mark Charan Newton has some ideas about why sales for sf is flagging while fantasy is still going strong. He comes across as the extra who had to nod and duck out of frame when Claude Rains said “Round up the usual suspects.” We have literary types and Hollywood and “We’re living in the future!” and, er, women. (Because “Women matter” which I guess is supposed to suggest that women as a group read very little science fiction, or that sf doesn’t appeal to women. Or something. The author doesn’t make it entirely clear, stating that sf readership is falling and citing “More women than men read books” as a reason, leaving the reader to draw the conclusion. I know there are many, many women who read sf, but I wonder whether the percentages match the percentage of the reading public as a whole.)

There are a couple of interesting comments and assumptions in the post. One is the comment about women I mentioned already. Another is that the LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER movies have driven people to read fantasy as a genre. While I’m sure that’s happened, I’m not all that convinced it’s happened at a significant scale. Harry Potter was bringing people into the genre well before the movies; that’s why they made the movies, actually.

An interesting question raised but not addressed in the post is that there are lots of science fiction movies out there (TV shows, too) but they don’t seem to be driving people to pick up sf novels. (In comments, “Niall” states that DOCTOR WHO is the exception, and if that’s true it would be interesting to figure out why.) Didn’t sf have a huge spike in popularity after STAR WARS?

He also states that he’s “talking about Space Opera, Hard-SF etc – the core genre.” I can’t help but wonder what parts of science fiction don’t make it into the core.

I guess my final point would be that I don’t expect science fiction will ever die. Not really. It might become the sort of thing that only a specialty press would want to publish for a core audience, but I seriously doubt it would ever fall to that level. Seriously doubt, in part because the poster notes that when talking about the survival of the genre, literary sf doesn’t count. I can’t quite figure out why.

I should mention that the last science fiction hard science fiction[1] novel I read was probably Picoverse, which was great fun until I realized the characters weren’t. My interest flagged quickly, and it occurred to me that several of the sf books I’d read recently had incredibly uninteresting or unbelievable characters. I’d been reading them out of a sense of duty–science fiction is supposed to be good for me, isn’t it? And the culture, too?–but not enjoying them. So I stopped. At this point I read mostly fantasy and mystery, and I’m happier for it.

[1] Discussion in comments has made me realize that I have read sf since then, but I wasn’t thinking of them as sf because I’d enjoyed them.

Randomness for 12/3

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1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.

2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.

3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.

4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.

5) I do not want to know.

6) Patrick Nielsen Hayden on HP Lovecraft, the founding of SF fandom, and friendships with people you’ve never met in person.

Randomness for 12/2

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1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.

2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.

3) “The slush pile seems, in some sense, to serve as a sort of representative sampling of the collective unconscious of the American public—a surreal landscape of vengeance, conspiracy, otherworldly beings, and really big guns. Sexual relations between ladies and gentlemen are fraught with peril (especially given that one or more participants in any romantic endeavor may very likely be aliens, demons, were-vampires, undead, or in a coma); queerness is almost nonexistent, as is any sort of radical politics (unless by “radical” one means “hoping to overthrow the government and install in its place a parliament selected by extraterrestrials from a more spiritually advanced dimension”); and people of color exist only as grotesque caricatures.”

4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.

5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.

6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.

7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.

SETI@home and recipe contest followup

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As a followup to the previous post about a guy fired for loading SETI@home, apparently, he’d done other things as well, such as “bring home” 18 computers, download pron at work, and claim to have done work he hadn’t done.

So, it’s not the wacky story the idiotic cnet writer made it out to be.

Also, we ate the T-Day leftover empanadas from the recipe contest for dinner on Monday. Verdict: we liked it! The next time I make them, I’ll cut the salt in half for the pastry–it was a little thirst-inducing. Least favorite for everyone was the bacon and cheddar mix. The favorite was different for each, with the boy liking the gravy best, and my wife and I favoring the cranberry.

Yeah, I’ll be making them again.

Suspect shot

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I haven’t been online all that much for the last few days, but the news here has been filled with stories of the four murdered police officers in Lakewood (a suburb of Tacoma). Coming hard on the murder of a Seattle police officer on Halloween night, it’s a tough time to be an officer of the peace in the northwest.

The suspect in that Halloween shooting was killed by police while the cop’s funeral was going on. Maurice Clemmons, the troubled Arkansas man who was the leading suspect in the shooting, was also shot and killed by a police officer investigating a stolen car early this morning. Early reports indicate he was carrying a gun taken from one of the officers who were murdered, but I’ll wait to hear if that’s confirmed.

I hope they got the right guy, and I hope the inevitable questions of “How could this have been avoided?” don’t run rampant. I sympathize with Mike Huckabee (for one of the first times ever) for the way “Governor frees convict who goes out to shoot cops” meme has been spreading. I sympathize with the Washington state government officials who only allow a suspect to be held without bail in capital crimes. Both tried to do the right thing, and no one has a crystal ball.

But we still have a chance to do the right thing here. Those four officers left behind 9 kids between them. You can donate to help support those families through the donate button on that page (which should be larger and more visible) or you can mail in a gift. Checks should be made out to the LPIG Benevolent Fund at P.O. Box 99579, Lakewood, WA 98499.