Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 60

On My Shelves: Godzilla 2014

 

     I have previously written on Godzilla as a franchise and what he meant to me from my childhood onward. Now Legendary has finally released the second American-made Godzilla movie (after the disastrous 1998 movie) and I have seen it.

     THIS is what Godzilla is intended to be. Before I move into detailed and possibly spoilery discussion, I want to just say that this was a great Godzilla film, one of the best of the entire franchise. It includes all but one of the elements I outlined as key elements of Godzilla, and the one it misses – the classic music – is of course replaced with its own soundtrack. I can’t quite judge how good that soundtrack is – the one drawback of current IMAX theaters is that they seem far too enamored of figuring out how to crank the volume to 11 on a scale of 1-10, so I couldn’t appreciate the music so much. Visually, though, it’s extremely good, and the kind of movie you SHOULD see in a big theater if you can.

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     As with the best of the earlier films, this movie gives us a backstory and a human story to go along with the monster-focused story. In this case, the deeper backstory – humanity’s first encounter with Godzilla and their attempt to stop him – is given during the credits, with no dialogue, just images, that show the entire process. It’s brilliantly done and compresses what could have been a half-hour of film into a few minutes with no loss of story for those watching carefully.

     The movie proper then begins in 1999, with a mysterious radioactive cavern filled with impossibly huge bones and… something else, then going to Japan and a nuclear reactor that has an eventually fatal problem. Here we meet our protagonist (though not the one we think is the protagonist at first) and his family, a family soon to suffer a huge loss.

     Fast-forward to today, and we find the young boy of the flashback, Ford Brody, is a grown man, a soldier with advanced explosives/ordnance training, a wife named Elle, a son named Sam, and a father – Joe Brody – with an obsession into finding out what happened, what really happened that day at the nuclear plant. Against his will, Ford finds himself drawn into his father’s final attempt to enter the cordoned-off exclusion zone around the old plant – and discovers that his father was right all along.

There was no earthquake, no ordinary natural disaster. The exclusion zone is perfectly safe, no traces of radiation. Instead, inside, within the ruins of the nuclear plant, is something, something alive and growing, being studied by a combined Japanese-American military force led by Dr. Ichiro Serizawa. Serizawa’s studies, which include data on the first encounter with Godzilla in the 1950s, have convinced him that in the early history of Earth there was an ecosystem of creatures who used nuclear isotopes in reaction as a source of energy; they have gone dormant, or burrowed deeper into the Earth, as the available nuclear materials on the surface became more scarce.

Of course, to such creatures, our nuclear plants represent some of the most concentrated food that has ever existed on Earth…

The creature chooses that moment to awaken, and despite the precautions taken, the humans are unable to kill it and it escapes containment, revealing itself to be a freakish monstrosity combining features of insects, crustaceans, reptiles, and perhaps other things – a creature of titanic stature but also capable of high-speed flight. It departs over the ocean, killing hundreds – including Joe Brody – in its escape, leaving Ford in the middle of the devastation, thousands of miles from his family. And the monster – named “MUTO” for “Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism” – is headed straight for the United States.

Shortly thereafter, a second MUTO – larger and slightly different in construction – emerges from where the military had stored what they thought was a dormant or dead sample of these creatures. It is quickly determined that this is a female and the first is a male, and they are heading for each other – to meet at San Francisco.

Serizawa believes that the other creature they have been studying – Gojira, or Godzilla – is a relic of the ancient time, the greatest alpha predator and perhaps more, a being whose purpose was to keep the true monsters under control. As Godzilla begins his own swift journey towards Hawaii – and later, towards San Francisco – Serizawa urges the military,especially Admiral Stentz who heads the task force, to allow Godzilla to deal with the MUTOs – especially since the only apparently feasible way to kill them appears to be a multi-megaton nuclear weapon, and Serizawa (like many people, Japanese and otherwise) is utterly against the use of such a weapon.

This movie is wonderfully done. Like the best Gojira films, Godzilla 2014 introduces us to the mythology and the problem in measured stages, allowing the screw to be turned slowly and inexorably until we finally arrive at a climactic confrontation between humans, monstrous MUTOs, and Godzilla himself.

Godzilla is perfect. He looks like himself – a new variation, yes, but the Japanese had at least a dozen significant variations of his appearance over the years too, so that’s no big deal. He is more bulky/massive than the prior ones, but not fat – he has the massive power of a wrestler or bodybuilder. He moves with the dramatic, slow deliberation characteristic of him throughout his tenure on the silver screen. He is utterly uncaring of the threat of ordinary human weapons. He has his breath weapon, and it is indeed as awesome as it should be. And he is something clearly more than just a dumb animal.

As a straight-up monster/disaster film, Godzilla is a success. It gives human dimension to the cataclysm with the characters we get to know, and presents – at least in my view – just the right balance between hints and shadows of the monstrous opponents and some straight-up screen time for the kaiju to take the gloves off and start kicking some ass.

Moreover, the characters are used smartly. The main character, Ford Brody, is given skills at the beginning which are important to keep him relevant to the plot, so that his constant presence at key events isn’t stretching things too far. Serizawa and Admiral Stentz, while arguing what approaches should be used, maintain a mutual respect for each other. There are no Idiot Balls carried for long distances in this film. Stentz recognizes, as time goes on and Godzilla’s behavior supports Serizawa’s thesis, that Serizawa has good reason for his beliefs, and in some ways would sincerely LIKE to believe that theory; but as a military man he has an obligation to use whatever resources are in his command to protect the people of the United States and the world, and he will do so.

Like many disaster films, it does skip over some other questions by simply not bringing them up and hoping we won’t either (for instance, why the MUTOs don’t head straight for the OTHER operating nuclear reactors instead of going after nuclear bombs being moved), but hey, for the sake of the movie I’ll let that slide.

What makes this film really fun for a fan of Gojira-sama and other kaiju films is that there are a huge number of nods and references to other Gojira/Toho films and even other films related to the monster movie genre. Perhaps one of the funnier ones is the main protagonist’s last name, and that of his wife: Brody. For those who don’t remember, the name of the sheriff played by Roy Scheider in the classic Jaws was Brody; for extra points, the sheriff’s wife was named Ellen, often referred to as “Ellie”, and in Godzilla the name of Ford Brody’s wife is “Elle”. I very much doubt this is coincidence.

The MUTO design combines many Kaiju features, perhaps the most obvious and interesting being the strangely wedge-shaped head which strongly draws on the design of Gyaos from Gamera tai Gyaos. Mothra, one of the most famous of the Toho stable of films, is referenced twice – once in a label of the fishtank in the old Brody home, and then by a quick glimpse of two pink-dressed women standing at the edge of a shattered building; they strongly resemble the Cosmos, the two tiny girls who were effectively the priestesses of Mothra. The combat between the two MUTOs and Godzilla nods to multiple Godzilla films, most notably Gojira Tai Megaguirus and Gojira 2000.

The humans also have notable roles to play even during the kaiju throwdown, and there are moments where human and Godzilla intersect in a way that indicates that unlike some incarnations of the King of the Monsters, this Godzilla can recognize some kinship between himself and these tiny beings.

Overall, this is just about as close to perfect as I could possibly have hoped for in an American Godzilla film. About all I could have asked for that I didn’t get was to have had them make some use of the original Godzilla theme music. Five stars, and I am sure to see this one again – and buy it when it comes out!

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Dante’s Peak

 

 

     One of the landmark events of my youth happened in the early morning of May 18th, 1980, during my senior year of high school. On that day, Mount Saint Helens suffered one of the largest recorded landslides in modern history – resulting in a cataclysmic volcanic blast which unleashed a pyroclastic cloud in a lateral detonation that scoured the landscape for up to twenty kilometers from the mountain. It was the first volcanic eruption on the U.S. mainland in two generations (the last being Mount Lassen in 1912) and one recorded in spectacular images that were transmitted around the world.

 

I had long entertained the idea of being a volcanologist, and had only recently reluctantly given up that dream (my counselors having convinced me that an effort-induced asthmatic sensitive to irritating vapors was not someone who should be making a career of visiting steep mountains leaking toxic and corrosive gas). That event nearly convinced me to go for that career anyway.

 

However, my fascination with volcanoes never wavered, and so when, in 1997, two separate movies featuring volcanoes appeared, I was pretty excited.

 

One of them, Volcano, was… a disappointment, to put it mildly. There wasn’t a shred of scientific accuracy in the presentation, and the plot and characters were ludicrous.

 

Not so for Dante’s Peak.

 

Dante’s Peak opens with the main character Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) and his wife Marianne (Walker Brandt), both volcanologists, driving desperately away from a volcano undergoing a major eruption (while I believe the eruption is stated to be in Columbia, the imagery and type of eruption echoes that of Mount Pinatubo). As they are nearing the safe zone, a volcanic “bomb” (a chunk of solidifying lava thrown into the air) tears through the car roof and kills Marianne (in a very grim scene).

 

Some years later, Dalton is asked to go to the town of Dante’s Peak, on the slopes of a volcanic mountain of the same name, to examine some signs of volcanic activity there. Harry’s been burying himself in work, and his boss Paul Dreyfus(Charles Hallahan) would rather he took a break, but Dalton refuses – though it’s implied that perhaps he could take a sort of vacation in the nice, peaceful town he’s going to visit. (We can see where this is going already…)

 

In some ways, the subsequent events echo Jaws – the looming threat that imperils the town, a celebration in the town which points up the success that it is now enjoying, and people trying to avoid assuming the worst which – in retrospect – they should have.

 

However, in this case it isn’t the mayor who’s the impediment, but Paul, who remembers false alarms called by Harry Dalton previously; it’s implied that they’re concerned that he’s overly paranoid about these things because of what happened in Columbia. Naturally, it turns out that this time Harry Dalton is 100% correct – and things are even worse than he thought.

 

Visually, Dante’s Peak is a marvelous bit of work, re-creating the visual effect of a Cascade Range eruption similar to Mt. Saint Helens almost perfectly, and previously showing us the beauty of the mountain and surrounding town to great advantage so that we can be all the more shocked when the destruction comes raining down. I’ve heard some criticize the film as being slow in the beginning (minus the opening), taking a long time to get to the action, but I think this was a vitally important choice – to take the time to establish the setting, the people, the mountain, and let the menace slowly but inexorably build. After all, it’s hardly as slow as Titanic!

 

However, what makes the film really work is the simple but well-told character stories – Harry’s final recovery from his loss by having an opportunity to actually save people and open up after his loss, Mayor Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton) coming to see this visiting scientist as someone she can rely on, Paul recognizing his mistakes and doing his best to make up for them, and so on.

 

The romance between Harry and Rachel is especially well done because it builds as slowly as the action, and is directly connected to his interaction with her family; unlike some movies, the children are integral parts of the movie’s action and when they make stupid decisions, they make them for appropriately child-like reasons and recognize their mistakes often without being told. The family clearly takes to Harry as a group, and the events of the movie help throw all of their personalities into sharp relief.

 

Once the action really starts, it never slows down. Dante’s Peak (the mountain) unleashes every weapon in a volcano’s arsenal against the defenseless town in a steadily escalating litany of disaster – toxic gases, earthquakes, acidic water, and – of course – culminating in a gargantuan pyroclastic eruption.

 

In addition, when compared to Volcano, Dante’s Peak is a doctoral dissertation of scientific accuracy. Much of the work depicted is very accurate, close to real life, and all of the phenomena shown – up to and including the highly acidic lake – are known volcanic phenomena. There is, of course, a lot of artistic license – I don’t think the acidification of a lake could be that swift, for instance, and the sequence with the lava flows is clearly drawing on lava flows of the Hawaiian model, not the dacitic, tremendously thick lava of the West Coast, and of course the whole survival of the car is… questionable, at best, ludicrous at worst. Still, these are – by Hollywood standards – almost trivial issues. At least we don’t have literal exploding “volcanic bombs” as they did in Volcano!

 

Overall, I give Dante’s Peak a nine out of ten, or four and a half stars. This was just a plain FUN movie, and even the ending of it combined character with technological innovation in a way that made for real heartwarming. I strongly recommend this film!

 

 

Just For Fun: My Top Ten Heroes

 

 

     For long-term readers of mine, this list may be as notable for who isn’t on it as for who is. The decisionmaking process on this was… difficult, to say the least. In the end, I had to go with my immediate gut reactions and leave out many, many heroes who certainly rank high in my personal pantheon. Do not take the absence of a character to mean I don’t appreciate them as a great hero and example; there are many such who simply don’t quite reach this top ten… or who might reach it on a different day.

 

#10: Spider-Man

     Peter Parker, geeky high school student, bitten by a radioactive spider and suddenly given tremendous powers by this random accident, makes a selfish choice… that costs him one of the two people dearest to him. He swears never to make that mistake again, dedicating himself to the principle that “with great power comes great responsibility”.

     There are, of course, bobbles in this resolution – mainly, in my view, caused by the nature of the comic-book medium, with multiple authors, company visions, and so on competing in the writing process. I judge my comic-book heroes based on what I see as their BEST storylines and writing, not the fumbles.

     And at his best, Spider-Man is the essence of the Hero. He carries on a one-man war against evil while sometimes barely eking out an existence in a one-room flat; he invents gadgets which could make him a fortune but keeps them as his trump cards in the battle against supervillains who often threaten his city; he goes to seek out these adversaries and confront them when injured, when so ill he can barely walk, and always, always driven by the ghost of his one mistake. Peter Parker is perhaps the strongest-willed person in the Marvelverse, and certainly one of the most deserving of the term “Determinator”. He has beaten foes that seemed utterly beyond him because he simply would not give up, because he would accept no other outcome but victory.

     He is one of the greatest comic-book heroes ever, and that lands him here, at number ten.

 

#9: Lord Valentine

     From Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle and its first two sequels, Valentine is one of the rarest of protagonists: a practical pacifist who truly does seek the peaceful way out of a problem, but who is willing to take the other path when no other way exists.

Valentine is one of the truly good people in fiction, with scarcely a drop of pettiness or evil within him. The evil done to him – depriving him of everything he ever knew, including his original body – was something so hideous that almost any other character would have sworn bloody vengeance on the perpetrator. Valentine, instead, tried to understand his adversary, to come to some accord with him – and in the end this leads him to a greater victory than any amount of violence.

Valentine also has the trait, common in many heroes, of gathering people to him who choose to follow him even into grave peril. In his case it is believable; we see the way Valentine acts, gravely courteous, considerate, innocent in a way, yet wise, that draws people to him. He is the perfect example of what a ruler should be… up to, and including, the desire not to be a ruler.

His heroic innocence and gentle determination bring him onto this list at number nine.

 

#8: Paksenarrion

     The sheepfarmer’s daughter who ran away to adventure and found far more than she could have imagined, Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion is one of the ultimate and defining versions of the D&D “Paladin” character type – the holy warrior for a god. In part this is because it was inspired(according to a conversation I had with her) by her overhearing someone playing a Paladin badly, and thinking to herself “that’s not how such a character would act!”. From that thought, Paks was born.

     Paksenarrion is the quintessential knight in shining armor: humble in her heart, devoted to her friends and to her ideals, courageous, and tough beyond ordinary belief. She begins as a simple military recruit, and through a sequence of strange events discovers that – through no intention of her own – she has been chosen as a Paladin, a hero of the god Gird. But it is not the choice that makes her a hero; it is clearly the fact that she is already a hero that has caused Gird to choose her.

     Paks survives one of the most horrific sequences of brainwashing and torment I’ve ever read, and somehow retains her self more than would seem possible. Having been chosen, she puts her faith into her god and from her god the faith is returned to herself. I invented Kyri Vantage long before I ever heard of Paks… but the two are not all that different. For her heroism and her honest, innocent determination, Paks comes in here, at number eight.

 

#7: Corwin of Amber

     He wouldn’t even like to describe himself as a hero, this Prince of Amber. Once he was like his other siblings: scheming, treacherous, self-involved, arrogant, certain of his place in the universe – and that place was, eventually, the throne of Amber, the One True City of which all other places are but Shadows.

     But then he was stranded in a distant Shadow, injured, ill, and lost his memory. For five centuries he wandered Earth, a lone immortal in the midst of humans, living as one, not knowing why he was not one of them.

     This changed him as few things could, and when he regained his powers – the reality-bending powers of a Prince of Amber – and went against his brother Eric (who had left him to die in that distant Shadow), even those working with him could sense there was something different in him.

     Ultimately, Corwin is offered the prize he sought – the Throne of Amber, rulership in effect of all Reality – and realizes he does not want it any more. He has found value in the Shadows that his siblings have ignored, has found more of himself reflected there than he wished to contemplate. In the end, he rides to the end of Reality in order to save it, and carves with his own will and blood a new Pattern on which to stabilize Chaos.

     For heroism that won’t even admit to the word, Corwin gets the seventh slot in my heroic countdown.

 

#6: Ellen Ripley

     There may be no more iconic female hero than Ellen Ripley, the ultimate survivor. Confronted with an alien lifeform that seems unstoppable, she survives when all her crew is dead, escapes, and defeats the creature with a last desperate ploy. Fifty years later, she accepts the loss of everything in her past life (including a daughter she had left behind) and begins to build a new life…

     … until she’s dragged back to the same world from which the monster came, the only expert the Marines working for the Weyland-Yutani company have to describe what they may face.

     But they don’t believe what she has to tell them,and once more when things go south, it is Ellen Ripley – once simply a pilot for a freighter – who takes control, who directs their actions and plans an escape, who survives. She finds a little girl, last survivor of the ill-fated colony on that world, and bonds with her, an echo of her own lost child. And when the aliens seek to take the newfound child away, they discover what a terrible mistake they have made.

     For human heroism that crosses the border from mere story to legend, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley gets my number six spot!

 

#5: The Doctor

     The Oncoming Storm. The Destroyer of Worlds. Time’s Champion. A madman in a box. He is an exile from his own world, a renegade traveling in a stolen machine which is one of the most powerful starships of fiction.

     He is The Doctor.

     The main character in the longest-running SF series of all time, Doctor Who, the Doctor is a Timelord, a native of the planet Gallifrey, who chose to break one of their most sacred laws: the principle of never interfering in the lives of those not relevant to Gallifrey. The Doctor refused to accept that the Timelords should keep their power and knowledge to themselves and never use it to aid the other species, and when told to cease his actions, stole a TARDIS and left… to become the stuff of myth.

     The Doctor has saved not just Earth but the universe almost countless times. He has battled human dictators, mad scientists, pitiless artificial intelligences, cyborg monsters, ancient beings that believe they are gods, space armadas, and his own people. He has burned through twelve bodies doing this, sacrificing himself again and again for the sake of people who may never know that they were in danger… or, given time travel, may never remember that it was even possible that they were in danger.

     But still he journeys, finding wrong and setting things as right as he can before he once again moves on. And that keeps him here, at number five.

 

#4: Dorothy Gale

     Once upon a time, a little girl found herself trapped in her house as a twister bore down upon it and ripped the house from the ground. When she awoke, she was in a bizarre magical land with no way home… unless the mysterious “Wizard of Oz” could show her how. And so this little girl named Dorothy (which, it so happens, was my mother’s first name too) set off down the Yellow Brick Road… and changed her world.

     Dorothy’s first journeys are fairly well known – if not very accurately – from the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland. The movie leaves out numerous other adventures, and much darker ones, such as the pursuit through the forest by the vicious Kalidahs. It also eliminates sequences in which the little party of adventurers solve their own problems, rather than needing intervention by Glinda.

     Through these adventures, the central figure and the driving force is Dorothy Gale. Despite her youth, Dorothy is a determined, couragous girl with a genuine faith in people and an absolute moral compass that directs her actions. She gathers the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow together and on their journey helps them find their true selves. She confronts the Wizard and forces him to reform. Captured by the Wicked Witch, she endures slavery and imprisonment until fortune frees her. Deprived of one hope, she is only briefly downhearted, then willing to take another route.

     But The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only her first adventure in Oz; she goes on to have many more, confronting perils from the core of the Earth to the highest peaks of the worlds. Dorothy is an exemplar of childlike heroism who was one of my ideals and heroes in my youngest years. For her unswerving dedication to her friends, her willingness to believe in even the worst evils being able to change, and her undaunted courage, she gets the number four slot on my hero countdown!

 

#3: Captain America

     Steve Rogers, literal ninety-eight pound weakling, patriot and would-be soldier rejected innumerable times by the U.S. Armed Forces during WWII. Suddenly he is given one chance to serve his country: as a human guinea pig in an experiment to create a “super-soldier”, a man who is stronger, tougher, faster, smarter than anyone else on the battlefield.

     The experiment succeeds, and the stick-thin Rogers is transformed into a tall, muscular, idealized version of himself – with incredible strength, speed, regenerative powers, perceptions, and even increased intelligence and learning capability. But spies sabotage the project and kill the only man with the key secrets to the process, leaving Steve the only result of the super-soldier project.

     But even one super-soldier can be of great use in the right circumstances… and thus is born Captain America, the living symbol of the United States.

     While Cap is a truly formidable opponent in almost any sense, it is not his powers that make him one of the great heroes; like others on this list, it is his heart and moral conviction that bring him to a place on my list. Captain America is the moral compass of his universe. He is the yardstick by which others in that universe are measured – and usually found very much wanting. He is also a man who does not think that he is anything extraordinary; he possesses a bone-deep humility that is almost certainly the major reason that he never even thinks about abusing these powers or exploiting his position.

     For being the hero that other heroes look to for guidance, Captain America gets the number-three slot!

 

#2: Naruto Uzumaki

     “Give up… on me giving up!”

     These words are the very distillation of Naruto Uzumaki. An orphaned boy who was isolated, even shunned, by the people of his village because – unknown to him – the demon who once nearly destroyed the village was sealed within him, Naruto began with only one burning desire: to make someone, anyone, recognize him as a person.

     Given a chance, this loudmouthed, in-your-face youngster seemed barely competent enough to justify the effort, but a few – a very few – were willing to give Naruto a chance. And that was enough to touch Naruto’s heart, make him open up… and as time went on, led to him recognizing that many other people shared the same need to have someone – the right someone – recognize them, listen to them, help set things right for them.

     As time went on, Naruto truly grew up. He recognized that friendship, honor, and – most importantly – empathy were the keys to peace, and that even his greatest battles must be fought with the awareness that unreasoning anger and hatred merely builds upon itself.

     Ultimately, faced with a man who had wiped out his village, Naruto defeated him… with a book and a name, and caused his nigh-godlike opponent to restore what had been destroyed… and place the trust he had sworn never to give to any into the hands of Naruto, believing in the end that somehow, impossibly, this one shinobi warrior would find a way to bring peace to the world.

     And he is still fighting for that ideal.

     For the journey to one of the most awesome heroes of all, Naruto gets the penultimate position.

 

#1: Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man

     I wrote in depth about this series exactly two years ago – May 9th, 2012 – and it was the very first post on this, my new website. There was a very good reason that I chose The Six Million Dollar Man as my very first post: Steve Austin was perhaps my greatest hero as a young man.

     Victim of a test-plane crash (which later turned out to not have been an accident), Steve Austin recovered from the horrific injuries to find that he was no longer the man he had been: he was a cyborg, a bionic man, possessed of superhuman speed, strength, toughness, and sight. At first shocked and uncertain as to whether he even wanted this, Steve quickly came to recognize that he had gained the capability to do things even more important for the country and people he cared for than his prior career as an astronaut or test pilot. Though I don’t think the words were ever used, he clearly knew that with great power came great responsibility.

     Steve was not merely a secret agent with awesome powers, though. He was the conscience of the OSI (Office of Scientific Research), and more than willing to serve as such even to his putative boss, Oscar Goldman. Early episodes often showed the clash between Goldman’s pragmatic approach and Steve’s belief that things could be handled in a more human and just fashion – and while Oscar’s pragmatism was often the wiser course, Steve’s was almost always the right course, even when sometimes it turned around and bit him.

     Steve Austin was – and still is – a symbol to me of what I wanted to believe America is, and should be. And for all that he has meant to me through the years, Lee Majors’ Colonel Steve Austin takes the top spot.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

 

     For once I’m reviewing something before it’s out of the theaters, rather than a decade later. Not bad. THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. The Spoiler-Free review: Awesome. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one too.

 

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     Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, for those hiding out from too much Internet publicity, the sequel to Captain America and The Avengers. Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, is sent on what seems a simple, if dangerous, rescue mission to free some hostages held by a group of terrorists – held on a ship that seemed innocent but is actually a SHIELD intelligence gathering vessel. But even as the Captain and his team succeed in their basic mission, it is put in jeopardy by the actions of Natasha Romanov (Black Widow), who spends significant time recovering data from the ship.

 

     Still, the operation is overall a success. Steve is extremely annoyed, however, that Fury gave Natasha a separate, secret directive which led to a potentially dangerous situation. Fury does agree that he should be kept more aware of the situation, and takes the Captain on a tour of a secret facility which is developing the ultimate counterterrorist weapon: a network of satellites linked to three SHIELD helicarriers with a massive array of pinpoint weapons.

 

     Such a massive flying force is, to Cap, clearly an indication of government overreach, a threat in the sky which can hardly have any good purpose, no matter how Fury tries to spin it. He leaves, but in a terrible frame of mind.

 

     And then someone tries to assassinate Nick Fury – many someones, a coordinated force disguised as police, and ultimately backed by a mysterious assassin who detonates a mine under Fury’s car and then rips the door off with his bare hand. Fury escapes this, meets up with Steve in his apartment… and then is shot by a sniper.

 

     This is the beginning of the descent of Steve Rogers into a darker and more terrible hidden world of espionage than he had ever dreamed existed… a dark world with an all-too-familiar origin. The Red Skull may be gone, but Hydra has not died; they went underground and became manipulators par excellence, easing their way into positions of power. They have been in on SHIELD’s development from the beginning, and their intention is to make a peaceful world… by wiping out any possible dangers pre-emptively. The networked helicarriers can actually predict the most dangerous and disruptive elements of society – those likely to lead or participate in opposing a government takeover, and can target hundreds of thousands of individuals at a time.

 

     Against nearly the entire might of SHIELD and their allies, now under the control of HYDRA, Captain America has only three assets: Natasha Romanoff, now also a hunted woman, Sam Wilson, a military man with a useful secret… and his own unswerving dedication to the America in his heart.

 

     The darker tone of this movie, so very apropos to the darkness in our own world that has been promoted by our own government ever since 9/11 (and already in development before then), does not detract from Captain America’s character; instead, it allows him to shine more brightly than ever. One of the things I loved about this movie was that despite the desperate nature of the situation, Steve Rogers refused to compromise on any of his ideals. He recognized that such compromise is anathema to anyone who wants to fight for America as it should be, and his companions – even those, like Natasha, with a far more pragmatic view of the world – know and accept that this is what makes Captain America worth following, worth fighting alongside… worth dying with.

 

     The Winter Soldier himself is a formidable adversary, but not the major one of the film – something I found both surprising and gratifying. The REAL enemy is Hydra, and the Winter Soldier is merely Hydra’s pawn. He represents Captain America’s past and his need to come to terms with it – and how he comes to terms with that ghost of his past is once more a defining moment of his character.

 

The discovery that his best childhood friend and fighting comrade Bucky is now a brainwashed weapon working for their worst enemy is one of the most horrific events of the movie, but there is not a single moment of doubt on Cap’s part that he will – that he must – find a way to get through to Bucky, bring him back to himself, regardless of the cost to Cap himself. Captain America doesn’t give up on people. Not now. Not ever.

 

     The grand finale is appropriately dramatic and cataclysmic – and multifaceted, as befits a story so complex. While much of the action focuses on Captain America and the Falcon trying to disable the helicarriers, it is mostly Black Widow who drives the confrontation. Black Widow plays a HUGE part in this film, and does so with panache, humanity, and total awesomeness. She is actually the one who strikes the deadliest blow against Hydra, and even manages to negate an attempt to take her hostage in another awesome fashion. Natasha Romanov needs her own movie, so I hope the Black Widow movie comes to fruition soon.

 

     I have said that the first Captain America was the best of the Marvel solo movies (The Avengers sitting in a slightly different category). Now I have to say that it will be VERY hard for any of the “second wave” of these Marvel films to beat out Captain America: The Winter Soldier for the crown in this category. I’m not sure if the second one is better than the first, but if it’s not, the race is very, very tight indeed.

 

     Five stars for this one, and I’m buying it when it comes out!

 

 

Music and Writing

 

     One of the key elements of the way in which I write is that I must have music playing. Quiet – as in dead silence – intrudes on my consciousness. I write best when I have sound that helps evoke emotions in me, so that I can try to evoke emotion in my words.

     This has naturally evolved into a habit of constructing a “soundtrack” for my books as I go along. In many cases the soundtrack becomes quite detailed, with a dozen or even two dozen tracks each representing a character, piece of the setting, or event. This helps me keep the mood and “flavor” of the world, or part of the world, that I’m working on fresh in my mind, anchors me in a way to the story I’m telling, the locale I’m telling it in, and the characters I’m telling it with. 

     This isn’t a unique thing; a lot of other authors have mentioned they do similar things from time to time. I have noticed that the type of music varies rather drastically.

     In my case, it has to be instrumental music, or at least music without voices speaking a language I understand. If I hear voices talking in words I understand, it starts to distract me from the words I’m trying to write. Thus, essentially no songs written or sung in English. There is an occasional exception (Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero”, for instance, was a significant piece in composing Stuff of Legend), but for the most part the music can’t obtrude its own words into my consciousness.

     The music – in general – also has to have positive emotion in it in some sense. Even the villanous themes need something that’s powerful and dramatic. I am, quite openly, a melodrama addict. Screaming death metal or similar stuff leaves me utterly cold; I hear no glory or victory in some guy shrieking half-understood words amid a bunch of whining guitars. Similarly, even if the words weren’t in English, a lot of emo-goth music fails to move me.

     So, most of my music comes from orchestral sources, and – because such music is quite deliberately constructed to produce powerful emotional reactions – often from movie and TV soundtracks. There are other good sources, such as classical music (Beethoven’s Ninth, Holst’s Jupiter, etc.), but in terms of proportion of my library, soundtracks of one sort or another make up the majority of my listening material.

     Music goes far beyond maintaining my connection and mood, however. Sometimes it writes the music. Sometimes a piece of music catches my attention when I’m trying to figure out a particular scene, a particular character, and the music’s pattern and thrust builds the remainder up in my mind, until it’s almost impossible for me to imagine the scene without that music.

For example, the scene I call “DuQuesne’s Victory” in Grand Central Arena was born from the piece of music I associate it with: “Trigger Situation” from Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. I knew very roughly what had to happen, but the details – how I depicted DuQuesne unleashing himself, the sequence of events in the combat and how it ended, were all summoned from my mind on repeated listenings to that piece of music.

The same thing is true in my soon-to-be-published Oz novel, Polychrome. The setup for and subsequent grand conflict at the end of the novel was laid out, in a very general sense, in my head, but it wasn’t until my brain seized upon two pieces of music that I suddenly found the details emerging in my head: “The Greatest Story Never Told” from Doctor Who, and “Stigmata”, from Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis.

Another example is the beginning of the final battle in my yet-to-be-completed trilogy Demons of the Past. The details of that confrontation, where all of the plots and counterplots of all three books finally collide and are resolved, revealing how the endgame of this gargantuan galaxy-spanning chess match will be resolved, became detailed and solidified for me when I listened to a piece whose title I can’t find a good translation to; Google translates the Kanji as “Victory of the Minutest Care” or, as Chinese, “Victory of Stigmata”, but it is the theme played in the Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Poltergeist Report movie when “The four spirits are as one” and they proceed to whip the CRAP out of the big bad who formerly totally outmatched them.

This kind of thing is tremendously important to me when writing. I need to have clear, and awesome, images in my head that I’m looking forward to, things I want badly to actually turn into words on the page. Knowing what “Crowning Moment of Awesome” I am working towards will pull me through momentary attacks of doubt, exhaustion, or confusion, provide a beacon for me to use in guiding myself through the plot. Where’s my destination? THERE! Can I get there by going this way? … no. How about this way? … nope, not that one. How about like this? … Yes! That’s it!

When I can, I post these soundtracks, but there’s a maintenance problem: most such pieces of music are under SOMEONE’s copyrights, and so they get taken down, and I end up with broken links. It’s a shame in a way; I encourage people to BUY the music I use, when possible (I wish there was a simple way to link to music on iTunes as an associate, the way I can with Amazon).

Music can also fit to the scene after I write it. I wrote the first version of Kyri’s confrontation with Myrionar many years before Doctor Who got its rebirth in 2005, but when I was working on the final version, I came to realize that the Season Four theme for The Doctor was exactly what I wanted to symbolize that scene. It works perfectly, evoking the quiet sense of loss and isolation,and then the sudden triumphal power of the answer that Kyri Vantage gets.

Music, of course, is flexible; it doesn’t have to be chained to a single set of events. Since I use a lot of soundtracks, this is obvious; this music starts out with a strong and very direct association with the events of the movie or TV series from which it comes, and I am naturally repurposing it when I start thinking of it as a theme for something I’m writing. The theme “Thor Kills the Destroyer” from the movie Thor has an obvious – and totally awesome – actual scene associated with it. But it also, in my mind, became the perfect piece of music to serve as Legend’s finale against his enemy Ragnarok in Stuff of Legend.

Even within my own writing the same piece of music can do double duty; the Season 4 Doctor’s Theme that became symbolic of Kyri Vantage’s confrontation with her god is also inextricably part of Polychrome, as I used the same piece of music when writing the sequence in which Eric Medon must discover a “beauty such as she has never known” to Polychrome, or fail Faerie in the very day he has first learned of it.

What music inspires you? Does any resonate for you in my own stories?

Let me know, if you would!

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The Iron Giant

 

Brad Bird is probably best known as the genius behind The Incredibles. However, he was also one of those responsible for another brilliant piece of animation, one rather unfairly obscure: The Iron Giant.

 

     Something crashes to Earth during the Cold War, leaving a trail of destruction through the Maine woods; when this giant mechanical figure rises and tries to find its way out, it encounters an electrical substation and electrocutes itself.

 

     Hogarth Hughes, a young boy who lives on an isolated farmstead with his mother, Annie, sees the trail of destruction and follows it, eventually finding the eponymous Iron Giant. Hogarth quickly discovers that despite its fearsome appearance, the Giant is utterly innocent and friendly – in fact, it has suffered complete amnesia and is a blank slate. Hogarth, an aficionado of comic books and science fiction, naturally thinks this is the absolute coolest thing ever, and undertakes to teach the Giant everything he can; when the Giant is badly damaged after being struck by a train, Hogarth manages to hide him in his family’s barn.

 

     But the Giant’s arrival did not go unnoticed, and Special Agent Kent Mansley of the Bureau of Unexplained Phenomena soon is on the trail of Hogarth and the Giant.

 

     The Iron Giant is a beautiful period piece, capturing the idealized America of the 1950s and adding in more authentic flavoring of Cold War paranoia and strong themes of self-determination and choice versus destiny and basic nature. Hogarth is a very convincing child character, but smart and loyal, whose actions in meeting and befriending the Giant may have actually saved the world – for we see evidence later that the Giant’s true original nature was very far from peaceful, and his powers of offense and defense are terrifyingly great.

 

     The conflict of trust versus paranoia is also a powerful and central one, and brings about the climactic scene of the entire movie, in which the Giant has to decide whether he will protect these people or not – some of whom have sought to injure not just him, but the boy he’d come to care for.

 

     I am quite deliberately not saying much about the details of the plot. In some ways The Iron Giant is a very simple and straightforward movie, and because of that if I detail many more facets of the story or characters it will largely spoiler the rest of it. But what I will say is that this is a film with a wonderful talent for covering the gamut between atmospheric terror, whimsy, drama, and sheer joyful comedy – a range few movies of any type can manage.

 

     There is in my view only one real flaw in The Iron Giant, and that is the character of Kent Mansley; he is made out to be cowardly at certain points which I think would have been more effective had he NOT been a coward – the danger of a paranoid is that they believe in their paranoid cause, and a person like Mansley would, as a character, have been better served to show that through strength rather than a predictable weakness.

 

     Still, how many movies have only one flaw? This is a marvelous movie, good for adults and kids, and well worth spending an hour and a half to see the one of the most unlikely friendships and the genesis of a most peculiar hero, whose final act brings tears to my eyes whenever I see it. I highly recommend The Iron Giant.

 

 

 

 

 

The Mechanics of (My) Writing

 

     I often get asked various questions about how I write, what my approach to writing is, how long it takes,and so on. This piece tries to cover all of these questions.

     The simplest way to describe how I write is the wiseass version: I sit down, open my computer, bring up the file, and write until I run out of story or time.

     Naturally, it’s not quite so simple as that.

     If I know what I’m writing – that is, I have the plotline clear in my head and I know the characters and so on – it can be about that simple. For the stories told in what I consider my “main universe” – which includes Digital Knight/Paradigms Lost and Phoenix Rising, but has many other stories written and planned – this is fairly common. I can sit down and start writing any of several stories pretty easily.

     This is because that universe is one I’ve been working on for over 35 years. I know that universe like the back of my hand. If I’m so tired that my eyes are trying to close on their own, I can still remember key facts about the way things work and finish planning out the rest of a chapter while I’m typing it. If I come to a point in a story where I actually haven’t figured out the details, I can usually just keep on writing, confident that my knowledge of how the world works will help me work things out on the fly.

     Thus – for me – the first thing I do with any new story is figure out the world it takes place in. Some people like to start with characters, but for me it’s the world – mainly because I have to know what the characters will have to live with, what strange (or not so strange) rules will govern their lives, in order to actually figure out the characters themselves.

     So far in my published or to-be-published writing career I’ve had to do that five times – first for Diamonds Are Forever (collected in Mountain Magic), then for Boundary, then Grand Central Arena, Polychrome, and most recently for the forthcoming Boundaryverse novel Castaway Planet, which is 200 years farther on and has a lot of new stuff I had to figure out.

     The amount of worldbuilding varies drastically. For Diamonds Are Forever, I actually wanted to leave a possible opening for that world linking with my own, so I was able to steal certain background concepts as foundations for parts of the world which gave me the origins of the Nowëthada and Lisharithada; it was in a sense a bit of a cheat, but it worked fine for such a short novel and by the time I was done I knew a lot more about the world.

     For Boundary there was a lot of scary work to do. I didn’t have to design the deep background – it was set in a version of this world thirty years hence – but I did need to come to understand space travel, and the technologies and challenges, to a depth I’d never expected, and figure out how to arrange specific events that would bring the characters together in interesting and exciting ways. Hard SF puts serious constraints on you; no zooming from planet to planet in a couple of hours, not with any tech we have or foresee, anyway. However, it did have the real-world advantage of having many people to consult with on how things worked.

     Grand Central Arena posed a completely different challenge – the need to make a space opera universe that wasn’t my main universe.  The core concept that Eric had planted the seed for was easy enough to grow – it fit an old, old idea I’d had many years before – but there was something missing, and it wasn’t until several elements dovetailed in my head – DuQuesne’s background, a particular set of Roger Dean images, and a few other disparate things – that I understood really what I was building and why.

     Polychrome had the terrible challenge of trying to take a series of children’s books written a hundred years ago and (A) resolve key contradictions, (B) construct a coherent world that was respectful of the original world, and (C) create a plotline that would maintain some of the essence of the original while being worthwhile for adults or young adults to read – not a children’s story, even though its origins were set in one of the oldest childrens’ series written.

     Castaway Planet’s challenges involved extrapolating from the Boundaryverse and then creating what I hope is a fairly unique world and set of challenges for the characters developed.

     Characters themselves have many different inspirations. In the Boundary series, some characters were invented by Eric Flint (most notably Helen Sutter, and the published version of Madeline Fathom is really his even if I did invent the name and general outline); others were mine and their origins varied – A.J. Baker is essentially two characters from Digital Knight crossed: Jason Wood and the super-hacker called “The Jammer”. Nicholas Glendale is clearly a nod to Dr. Carl Sagan, just in a paleontological setting; and so on. Grand Central Arena of course features characters directly and admittedly inspired by others, with Marc C. DuQuesne being the most obvious. Stephen Fransceschetti and Carl Edlund are direct Tuckerizations of friends of mine; Ariane Austin combines the hotshot pilot template with her namesake Steve Austin. In Castaway Planet we stole a lot of character concepts from the original inspirations – prior “Robinsonades” – and put our own spin on them.

     Familiarity, or lack thereof, with the universe influences how much planning-ahead and outlining I prefer to do. Sometimes I still have to outline – and it’s a task I hate with a passion – because my publisher wants an outline first, before they buy anything. In general, though, the outline is a skeleton that may fall apart once the writing starts.

For instance, I just completed Phoenix in Shadow, sequel to Phoenix Rising, and the outline mostly went out the window pretty quickly. As I know that world so well, I didn’t even use the outline once I started writing, except to look up names or something similar that I remembered inventing for the outline and didn’t want to re-invent. But for the most part, I literally just let the characters lead me through their adventures until they reached the climactic points which I did know.

That latter bit is one of the crucial parts of writing for me. I absolutely must know what I’m heading for, and specifically I need to have in my mind some awesome, spectacular, and/or tearjerking scene that will serve as the climax of the story. I write towards that scene, as a goal. Everything within the story will be focused on serving that goal of reaching that climax, and making sure that every single piece needed to make that envisioned scene work will be there, precisely as required.

Thus, when I was writing Grand Central Arena, I had – constantly in mind – Ariane’s throwdown with Amas-Garao and her impossible triumph as my goal, as the thing that made writing all the rest both necessary and worthwhile. I did also have a few interim scenes that drew me onward as they came to mind, such as DuQuesne’s Victory, and there were even scenes from later on – one of the climactic scenes in Spheres of Influence was clear in my mind by the time I had GCA halfway written, and I have a couple other similarly climactic scenes in my head for later books in the series.

Similarly, before I even wrote the first words in Phoenix Rising, I knew not only the basics of the climactic confrontation in that book, but a great deal about the final battle to take place in the third book.

This means that my characters are designed towards the plot. They may be fairly detailed as characters, but since I know their destinations, their entire creation process is geared towards making them the kind of people who will end up in that climactic situation. I don’t generally constrain the characters much OTHER than that. And sometimes characters do surprise me. Nicholas Glendale was supposed to be a one or two shot character, used and tossed away; instead he became one of my favorite strong secondary characters in the Boundary series. The character Miri in the forthcoming Phoenix in Shadow followed a different path than originally planned; and so on.

“How fast can you write”? Well, when I’m writing, I have typically averaged about 1200 words per hour. Those are finished words, I should note. I am rather unusual as an author in that I very, VERY rarely do “drafts” of stories (unless given specific edits to do by an editor). What you read is, quite often, exactly what came off my fingers the first and only time it was typed.

Given that, in theory if I had the ability to dedicate myself full-time to writing I could crank out about 2.4 million words a year; this is roughly twenty books. Practically speaking, of course, it wouldn’t approach that. There are other things one has to do as books are prepared for publication that start to take up time, and as you do more books, those tasks will eat more time. Plus of course you have the work of figuring out just what you’re going to WRITE for that many books. In practice, though, I could probably manage 6 books a year without much difficulty.

Of course, I don’t have full-time writing available as a choice. My actual time to write per week varies but probably averages, over a year, 4 hours a week; I generally write two books and change per year with that amount of time.

Time is also variable depending on the existence of a book contract. Without a contract, I cannot justify as much time away from family and other obligations, so I get fewer hours to write. With a contract I have guaranteed payment for completing a book and there is direct justification for giving me more hours to write in.

I hope this has given some insight into the way one particular author actually carries out the core function of any writer: writing.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: One Piece – The Second Piece!

 

 

     A while back, I reviewed the shonen anime One Piece. That review covered what I had seen to that point, but One Piece is a titanic piece of animation, a series still ongoing after more than 630 episodes. I’m now going to talk about what I’ve seen of One Piece since – up through around episode 380.

     When we last left our group of intrepid pirates (who are about as piratical in their normal behavior as Will Turner and Jack Sparrow in his gentler moments), Monkey D. Luffy had just managed to defeat God Enel/Eneru, a Devil Fruit user who had gained the power of lightning – including the ability to transform into pure energy.

     Subsequent to this, the Straw Hat crew leave Skypeia (with a fair amount of treasure, but a lot less than the Skypeians would have given them) using a typically One Piece ridiculous method: a gargantuan waterfall from the sky country down to the normal world (as normal as it gets in One Piece, anyway), slowed by a hot-air… octopus. Yes, that’s what it sounds like.

     The Going Merry ends up plummeting straight into the center of a Marine stronghold. The crew escapes but the ship is captured, and a considerably complex adventure ensues with the various crewmembers having to somehow elude capture or, in some cases, make allies within the Marines, and then eventually meet up and escape.

     During this arc we are refamiliarized with the use of kairoseki, a stone which embodies the nature of the ocean. Mentioned before a few times, the stone is used by the Marines and others to allow them to combat the users of the Devil Fruit, as kairoseki affects them just as does the ocean – taking away their powers and drastically weakening them. The effect is very much like the classic Superman encountering green Kryptonite. The Marines capture Luffy in a net with pieces of kairoseki at the intersections and it renders Luffy utterly useless until he’s cut free.

     The existence and (relative) availability of Seastone (as kairoseki is generally translated) is a crucial element in the world, showing that even ordinary people do have an “equalizer” to use against these superpowered beings.

     Having escaped, Luffy and the Strawhats have a number of somewhat lighter adventures, most notably contesting with “Foxy, the Silver Fox”, leader of the Foxy Pirates, whose major approach is to challenge other pirate crews to a “Davy Back Fight”, a series of contests in which the loser must forfeit a crewmember to the winner.

In keeping with his “fox” motif, Foxy often cheats during these contests, and for older viewers, like me, or those familiar with American animation from my childhood era, they’re particularly amusing because it is very clear that Foxy and multiple members of his crew are deliberate references to the Whacky Races, with Foxy being Dick Dastardly, the monkey-like Hamburg being Muttley (right down to the “eeeheheheheheee” laugh), and multiple other characters and events referencing these old shows.

I’m rather surprised to see no note of this in the One Piece Wikia, although that Wikia does note that in appearance Foxy actually resembles very strongly another Western creation, Count Chocula, though without the fangs.

Eventually, Luffy moves onward, has a strange encounter with Admiral Aokiji warning him about the dangers of being associated with Nico Robin, and then to Water Seven, a city with perhaps the best shipyards in the world, so they can repair the Going Merry after all the damage and stress it’s been through; Usopp has done his best to keep her together, but he’s no shipwright.

Unfortunately, upon having the ship inspected by Kaku, one of the best workers in Water Seven, it’s discovered that the Going Merry is, effectively, dead in the water. In addition to all the other cumulative damage, the keel itself is cracked. This can be only temporarily braced; it will eventually break and the ship will sink.

This leads to one of the most heart-rending sequences of events, in which Usopp – personally attached to the Merry and feeling utterly out of his depth with the “monsters” in the crew, refuses to accept that the Going Merry cannot be repaired, and ends up challenging Luffy for the ship. Usopp does startlingly well – demonstrating his speed with his sling, long-term strategy and tactical thinking, and a hell of a lot of courage to face down a man who’s taken out one of the Shichibukai, basically a group of super-powered former pirates employed by the World Government.

The subsequent events are the most involved and dramatic sequence yet in One Piece: we learn of Nico Robin’s past and the fact that she may hold the secret to operating an ancient superweapon, while also discovering that several of the shipwrights of Water Seven – the most respected and loved members – are deep-cover moles for the World Government, part of a super-secret spy cell called CP-9, which features some of the most powerful agents of the Government, spying on Iceberg, the leader of Water 7, who they believe has the blueprints for such a superweapon. In addition, Nico Robin appears to either be one of them, or has decided to betray the Straw Hats to them for her own reasons. Luffy and the gang are given a decisive beatdown by Rob Lucci, leader of CP-9, and his subordinates.

But Nami and the others soon learn the truth: Nico Robin joined CP-9 on one condition: that her friends would all leave Water 7 alive. CP-9 had intended to kill them all, if necessary using an extreme measure named the “Buster Call”, which amounts to calling out  ten gargantuan battleships to shell an entire area into flaming ruin, wiping out EVERYTHING in that region.

But once Luffy knows that Robin had not betrayed them –had, in fact, offered herself as a sacrifice to save them – there is of course no question but that they are all going to rescue her.

Usopp, meanwhile, learns from a renegade shipwright and gangleader named Franky that the repairs he saw done to the Going Merry while in Skypeia – repairs performed by a shadowy figure that no one saw before or after – may have been done by the spirit of the ship itself. Vessels that are greatly loved can sometimes develop their own spirit, and Franky believes this is the case with Merry. Yet even this won’t save the ship from its own weakness.

Franky turns out to be another target of CP-9,however, because he used to be a partner of Iceberg’s, and Iceberg had entrusted him with the plans to the superweapon; in the swift and brutal fight, Usopp is beaten badly and the Going Merry is sent hurtling away down a sluice, straight into an oncoming tsunami.

I won’t continue recounting the entire plot; as it is, I’m oversimplifying and skipping over key information.

This set of episodes truly set One Piece far above its initial silly appearance. The battle of the Straw Hats against one of the greatest strongholds of the World Government, the final justice complex called Enies Lobby, is titanic, heroic, and often heartrending… and then filled with crowning moments of awesome.

None of these, perhaps, are more impressive than those of Usopp. Still technically separated from the group by his own pride and actions, he still cannot bear to not help to retrieve Robin. To accomplish this without insulting Luffy (by just joining up without resolving what lies between them), he invents a new persona, “Sogeking”, the masked hero called the King of Snipers (complete with a cheesy Sentai Hero song), and joins the party that way.

Behind the mask of Sogeking, no longer having to deal for the most part with the preconceptions of being the constant screwup, Usopp shows more initiative and courage. He is far from truly brave, but his pride keeps him more in the forefront and he gets a few moments that allow him to prove – not just to the group, but more importantly to himself – that he really does have a role to play in the Straw Hat crew, useful skills and knowledge that the others lack… and learns that they do care about him in their own way.

Perhaps his greatest moment of awesome comes when the main villain of the piece is mere steps from transferring Nico Robin to a prison ship and escaping. Suddenly the villain goes down in flames, and the guards around him start dropping. Looking around, they can find no cause, nothing that can possibly be doing this! Is their enemy invisible?

And then one guard points up, and the others stare in disbelief. A single figure stands atop the Enies Lobby headquarters – something close to a mile away – and is sniping them down, one shot, one kill, in a near-hurricane wind, with a fancy slingshot. “Sogeking” absolutely earns his title in that moment, the grand finale being to deliver the keys to unlock the Kairoseki handcuffs that have kept Nico Robin powerless.

There are countless other touching and awesome moments in this sequence – the reveal of how two Giants came to be working for the government, and why; the duel between Luffy and Rob Lucci; Nami’s defeat of a CP-9 agent by cleverness and guts; and more. This sequence builds the Straw Hats into a team, a team with devastating power and coordination who – despite internal bickering – is absolutely united when someone takes one of their own, and more than able to do something about it.

Yet in the end they are cornered, exhausted, out of power and tricks… and as they are about to be captured, their last, forgotten nakama appears to save them:

The Going Merry. The little ship appears out of nowhere, rescues them, and somehow allows them to escape from the Marine trap.

The subsequent sequence in which they must truly say goodbye to the Going Merry forever is a true tearjerker – and so is the sequence in which Usopp must finally swallow his pride and admit he was completely wrong and beg to be allowed to rejoin the crew.

Following this, the crew have a new crewmate – Franky, a cyborg shipwright who not only builds them a new ship but comes along to make sure she’s properly kept in shape. Naming the vessel the Thousand Sunny, they set off – after a brief encounter with Luffy’s grandfather, who happens to be an Admiral of Marines who’s also trained Coby, the little cowardly boy Luffy met in the very first episode, into a fairly formidable fighter.

The subsequent adventures range from the silly to the deadly serious, and net the Straw Hats yet another crewmember – “All Bones” Brook, a living skeleton created by a macabre, unforeseen side effect of the “revivication fruit”: if you die but your soul has a hard time finding your body (as can happen if your body is stranded on a ship in a mystical fog meant to mislead even those with special powers) it may take years to find you. And it will STILL revive you… even if all that’s left is a skeleton.

Overall, these two hundred or so episodes were even better than the first, and I am looking forward to seeing where else One Piece will take me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Musings on “Internet Piracy”

 

     I have something of an unusual perspective on intellectual property infringement of the type that’s called “piracy”. First, I put that word in quotes because I dislike it. It is an inadequate and inaccurate description of the problem which both romanticizes and exaggerates it.

 

     The word “piracy” in modern ears usually (especially in the sheltered civilized areas where real pirates, who still exist in some of the seas of the world, don’t prowl) evokes a dashing, romantic imagery of swashbuckling action and cheerful rogues, most recently exemplified by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. A more accurate image of the online pirate is of some random guy clicking “download” on a screen. There’s no romance and for most of them little-to-no effort involved; it’s a casual act worthy of at most a fleeting thought.

 

     On the other hand, the word “piracy” carries with it the implications of violence – red-handed raiders finding some helpless victim and despoiling them of all their valuables, possibly leaving them all dead. Modern internet piracy hasn’t a shred of violence in it, and the victims aren’t despoiled, directly, of their valuables; they still have their possessions.

 

     Thus, in neither case is “piracy” an accurate term. Neither, to be honest, is “theft”, at least not as commonly depicted. A recent meme I saw passed around compared it to being a baker and having some guy come in taking your pies to use for his own business. That analogy, however, is *hideously* flawed to the point of dishonesty. If you’re producing a physical product and someone comes and takes it from you, you are directly out money – you can’t replace that object without buying or making another – and directly out sales opportunity (because you cannot SELL that particular product now that it has been taken).

 

     Modern internet IP infringement activities do not take the original away from the owner; in fact, a large amount of it is based on taking a perfectly legal copy purchased from the owner and duplicating it. The duplication does not harm the original copy, nor remove it from use by the original owner. No one loses anything physical at all.

 

     This isn’t to say that these activities are either right – they’re generally not – nor that they do not have the potential to cause the owners of the IP harm, because they do. But I find it acutely painful to hear it argued in terms that are clearly inaccurate to straight-up wrong.

 

     Technically, these issues have been around long before the Internet became an important part of most peoples’ lives; “pirate recordings” of band performances, or copies of movies, were around for a long time, and I encountered pirate, or bootleg, copies of foreign films in commercial stores more than once (and discovered that there wasn’t anything that the FBI or other agencies could do unless the original rightsholder was willing to prosecute an overseas claim).

 

     However, the old-style bootleg copies – onto cassettes and VHS tape – had the huge disadvantage (from the point of view of the bootlegger) or advantage (from the point of view of the IP holder) that the quality was invariably worse than the original, and decreased with every copy. This meant that while many people might see your show or hear your music through these means, you had a fairly good reason to believe that they’d still want the original, legal stuff if they could get it, because it would be noticeably better.

 

     With modern digital copying, this is no longer true. The thousandth copy of a given song done by digital means will be exactly as good as the first copy. A copy of a copy of a copy is no longer guaranteed to suck.

 

     I first encountered these issues in their modern context working for a company that (to make a long story  which I may or may not tell later short) took its nice stable business model, deliberately torpedoed it, and attempted to create a clone of Napster with a few added wrinkles, ending up being sued by the Big Boys for something like two billion dollars. Until then, I wasn’t clear on just how common this “downloading” of music and, later, movies was.

 

     Ironically, I had anticipated this could be a problem a long time before. In 1991 or 1992, I sent mail to RCA Records and a couple of others detailing how music and image (and later film) transfer over the Internet could become an issue, OR the Next Big Thing, and urged them to start preparing for this change, maybe thinking about how they could offer their wares online as the bandwidth became available and computer and Internet connections became more widespread.

 

No replies were forthcoming; I suspect the letters were probably read to either gales of laughter or incomprehension and consigned to the circular file. I do occasionally wonder if any of the original recipients, a decade or so later, had a vague memory of reading something about this kind of thing before it became an issue.

 

Now, before we go further, I should make it clear that, in my view and that of the law, there’s not much doubt that most such downloading (not done through legal services like, say, iTunes) is in fact illegal, and is certainly rude; you’re copying something because you happen to want it and don’t want to, or cannot afford to, pay for it. That isn’t an interesting argument; legally, it’s a settled one and there’s no rebuttal to be had.

 

What is interesting to me is whether it is wise or worthwhile to spend much time and energy stopping it, which hinges upon what the factors are that drive it, and to what extent this sort of infringement actually (as opposed to theoretically) damages the IP owner, or even if it actually does damage them.

 

The latter question often causes some proponents of severe punishment for such infringement to splutter in rage (yes, even online, people can splutter in a sense). But it is in fact a very valid question and possibility. From the point of view of an IP owner (such as, for example, myself, a published author with a number of works that can be both legally and illegally obtained online), there are four divisions of possible downloaders;

 

1)    Download the item and would never pay for it; they may be collectors for collectors sake (yes, there’s a pretty large population of downloaders who seem to have as their main goal showing off that they got more stuff, faster, than anyone else, not that they would, or even COULD, read/watch it all), or they may simply feel that they have the right to read or watch whatever they want without paying for it. These people cannot count as “lost sales”; they would NEVER have bought your item, so the fact that they have a no-cost-to-you duplicate of it is not a lost sale; if you had prevented them from downloading it, you still wouldn’t have gained a sale.

2)    Download the item and may purchase it if they like it. This group is often simply discriminating shoppers, but a lot of online “sample” choices are too limited for them to feel comfortable making their (probably limited) purchase choices based on limited information. These can be at least as easily counted as potentially GAINED as lost sales. While some of these people will choose NOT to buy the item, they most likely would not have bought at all without the sample anyway, so for the most part any purchases of your item by these people was facilitated by the illegal download.

3)    Download an item that they would have paid for if they couldn’t have gotten it for free. This group is the “clear loss of sales” group. If you could prevent these guys from downloading your stuff, they would buy it; if you can’t, they won’t buy your stuff because they already have it.

4)    Don’t download and won’t purchase. These people don’t matter to either side; your product doesn’t interest them at all and they won’t get it in any event.

 

So, looking at that list, you can see that there really is only one category – number 3 – which can be clearly counted as “loss of sales”.

 

More interesting, however, is the possibility of someone encountering your work for the first time through someone with an illegal download of it. Because – here’s the ugly truth – the biggest enemy of you, the author (or musician, or whatever) is not the downloader who reads your work for free. It’s obscurity. It’s the fact that out of every 100 people who, if they knew about your work, would buy your work, you are probably getting the attention of one, or two, or MAYBE three. If you happen to be a Big Name, you MIGHT be reaching 25, or 50. If you happen to be J.K. Rowling, you just might be up to 80. Big-bucks blockbuster movies might reach this level, too.

 

But if you’re like me, Mr. Midlist? One or two out of a hundred. Your enemy is the fact that no one knows that you exist. In that case, it is quite possible that you end up with more sales because of illegal downloading showing your name to people who do buy your stuff.

 

“That’s ridiculous”, I have heard a number of people say. “No one would pay money for something they could get for free.”

 

Well, I can start with the direct anecdote: I’ve paid for a lot of stuff that I could get for free, or even that I had gotten for free earlier but that I bought once I could get it legally. So I have trivially disproved “no one”.

 

More importantly, though, iTunes stands as a pretty much absolute disproof of this idea. Most, if not all, of what iTunes offers IS in fact fairly easy to find for free online. Yet people routinely buy hundreds of millions of dollars of music and movies and TV shows from iTunes. Why?

 

Convenience and value.

 

The sales of CDs took their biggest hits for those two reasons. Online downloading, especially once Napster appeared, was hellishly convenient. I didn’t have to go outside my house and find the CD. I just clicked on the track and presto!, the song was there for me to listen to.

 

And CDs, in general, did not offer good value. Once burnable CDs became available, the general public realized that the cost of a CD itself was literal pennies, and for most people a CD isn’t all valuable; most people have two or three tracks that they really like, a few more they think are pretty good, and the rest… not so much. So the cost of a CD was at least half wasted. A downloader can pick and choose the tracks they want and prioritize getting them based on how much he or she wants them.

 

iTunes recognized this instantly. Instead of $20 albums, the albums generally cost $10 (well, $9.99), and – far more importantly – the individual tracks can generally be purchased for $0.99, which is perceived as approaching nothing in cost even by people with relatively little spending money. Moreover, iTunes recognizes purchases on an album and reduces the price of that album by the amount already spent. Buy five tracks, the $10 album is now $5, and maybe you decide “what the heck, the rest of the album’s probably worth $5″, but you wouldn’t have said it was worth $15.

 

The combination of convenience and higher perceived value convinced many people to buy what they could, if they desired, have gotten for free.

 

The flipside is demonstrated by the Baen Free Library, which began by offering books for free download that were still on sale. The assumption by many people in the industry was that this would torpedo book sales – that whatever books were put in the BFL would see their sales tank permanently.

 

Instead, the opposite was generally true, most spectacularly in the case of On Basilisk Station, the first volume in the Honor Harrington series. Its sales had dropped to very sluggish levels prior to the BFL being started; after the BFL released it, On Basilisk Station shot back up to the top of Baen’s charts and remained there for a long time, not only selling briskly but supporting a brand new, low-cost hardcover reissue.

 

It’s also unwise, in my view, to prosecute/pursue people for downloading or similar infringement if they’re doing it as private individuals with no profit involved (i.e., they’re not trying to sell your stuff). This will be bad publicity, making you look like a big bad guy stomping on the smaller victim, even if you have a perfectly good legal justification to do so. This effect gets worse the higher up you go; the MPAA/RIAA and their associated megacorps like Time Warner just look like big bullies every time they do this.

 

And – honestly speaking – I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their position if they had not (as a group) made tremendous efforts to (A) prevent anything from ever entering public domain again, as it should, and (B) prevent huge swaths of people from being able to access their products legally at all.

 

(A) is really a tragedy and outrage. The entire point of copyright and other IP law was to encourage the creation of new material by allowing the creator a limited period in which he or she had exclusive rights to profit from their creation – topping out originally in the USA (Copyright Act of 1790)  at 28 years total (14 years with a second 14 year period if renewed). By this original standard, things like the original Star Trek and Star Wars would be public domain by now.

 

Public domain is important to creators and the society in general. We are richer for having Shakespeare, Verne, Wells, Austen, and many other creators’ work available for all to read, work with, borrow from, and enjoy without limit. It was never the intent of those creating IP law that it would enable corporate entities to withhold such IP from the public essentially forever, yet this is exactly what it is being used to do. (there are in some ways even worse abuses being made in the area of trademark, which is being used to provide what amounts to copyright protection without any of the even theoretical limits on time)

 

(B) is accomplished through multiple means, but perhaps the most familiar is region coding. All that region coding accomplishes is to make it difficult for someone living in region X to use material produced by Region Y. This isn’t even about sales, as such; if the material in Region Y was made available without issue to region X, the people in Region X would buy the material. But for various business reasons, companies have promoted the creation and limitation of these business areas and thus they have created an artificially-frustrated  demand for those products – one which will be served by the downloaders.

 

DRM is also another version of (B). It prevents people from being able to use the product in the way that heretofore was perfectly normal and treats the customer as a potential criminal, causing them to – quite rightly – resent the entire concept of DRM. Similarly, the behavior of companies such as Amazon demonstrating that in their view you aren’t, technically, buying the material but sorta renting it really causes a violent reaction against paying anything but the most trivial fee. In my case, for instance, if I’m not going to actually own a book, or a piece of software, there’s no way I’m paying double-digit dollars for it, let alone (as is common with some software packages) triple or quadruple figures.

 

This isn’t of course to say that it’s right that the downloaders do what they do. But it is to say that a company – or government – that chooses to ignore this issue is helping to promote it, to create justifications for it in the minds of the public, and – in creating extreme punishments for what the public views as a relatively trivial crime – generate contempt and disregard for these laws and related ones.

 

This could easily be remedied, of course. Baen Books has been a successful leader in this area specifically because they recognized that obscurity was the enemy and ease of access was their weapon against obscurity. Their ebooks come in multiple formats and have no DRM. They are trying to revive the Baen Free Library (temporarily severely reduced due to the necessities of doing business with Amazon – long story). They will go after people who are selling their authors’ work illegally, but have even released huge collections of their authors’ works with explicit permission to copy (as long as all attributions are retained). This has gained them tremendously in publicity, in respect, and – it would appear – in sales.

 

If other companies would follow that lead, I suspect that they would find that “piracy” would become much less of a problem… and business would be booming.

 

 

 

Under the Influence: The Lord of the Rings and J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

 

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,

One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

 

     There may be no other modern work which has so completely defined and then overshadowed a genre as The Lord of the Rings. Written by John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R.) Tolkien and published in the three volumes of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings tells the tale of a small, unlikely hero, the Hobbit named Frodo Baggins, and his friends’involvement in a quest to destroy the most powerful and malevolent device ever created in the world of Middle-Earth.

 

     The Lord of the Rings absolutely defines the “epic fantasy”, and influences virtually all other forms of fantasy, at least as much as E. E. “Doc” Smith’s works defined “space opera” and influenced most other branches of SF in one way or another. However, where Doc’s works have faded from general knowledge and even the genre he invented has greatly evolved away from its original roots, Tolkien’s classic work remains staggeringly successful, a towering presence that completely dominates the field.

 

     I first encountered The Hobbit as a few paragraphs in someone’s report in junior high school; it didn’t grab me, probably because the selected piece (Bilbo VS the spiders) lacked the background that makes that confrontation so powerful to read. But later, in high school (possibly even in that magic year of 1977) I was introduced to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, its supposed prequel, and I was immediately captured, entranced by this world.

 

     And it was the world that captured me. The characters of Lord of the Rings are not terribly detailed as characters; while they have enough quirks to make them distinct, they are for the most part archetypes which Tolkien derived from his deep and broad knowledge of folktales, myth, and legend. His characters are often powerful images because of this, but at the same time they often leave considerable questions open about what they’re like as people outside of the requirements of the quest.

 

     This isn’t, of course, terribly important in this sort of book. The point is the world and the quest, and these are extremely compelling. Tolkien was originally drawn into this project by his love of languages; he invented his first artificial language when he was quite young, and to a great extent it was the desire to build these languages into a comprehensible and sensible framework that underlay the construction of Middle-Earth. This, combined with his very deep knowledge of myths and legends and an interest in constructing a uniquely British myth-cycle of his own, produced the universe of Lord of the Rings.

 

     Certainly it was the Appendices – with their notes on language, on unique alphabets which were not mere substitution ciphers of the standard alphabet, fragments of legends and events thousands of years in the past – that gave me the feeling of awesome spans of time and depths of reality that infused Middle-Earth. I could see the immense work devoted to that universe, and it was (and is) one of the few things that left me feeling humbled when I contemplated what he had done, and how much work had gone into that construction.

 

     The work, of course, would be pointless if the story it supported didn’t work, but work it does. For some, the language is overwrought, ponderous, and the story takes far too long to get moving; but to me, the stage-setting of the Birthday Party, of the hints of danger interspersed with the protagonist Frodo just mostly going on with his life, are necessary parts of what comes after. We couldn’t empathize so much with Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin and their concern for their homeland the Shire if we had not seen the Shire, and recognized how precious that quiet, semi-hidden land is – how mundane, yet extraordinary, just as are its inhabitants, the diminutive Hobbits.

 

     Tolkien’s vision pretty much defined all the key players in epic sagas – the Old Wise Wizard, the Lost King, the Dark Lord, the small yet important little persons, modern views of Dwarves, the noble Elves, etc. – and yet it is interesting to note that many of the later interpretations of those roles, though clearly inspired by Tolkien’s, almost invert them in practice.

 

Gandalf is called a wizard and is, in fact, a being of great power, yet we almost never see him using that power. There are literally only a handful of times in Lord of the Rings where he does anything magically impressive. This contrasts with many other works, in which the defining trait of a wizard/mage is that he throws around magic. D&D took this to the extreme; low-level wizards are so fragile that if they didn’t have magic they’d be insane to step outdoors, while higher-level wizards can level towns in a fit of pique.

 

Similarly, Aragorn is the Lost King, a descendant of an ancient line destined to inherit the greatest mortal kingdom on the planet. Yet, unlike many of his later parallels, his greatest fame and skill is not being a great warrior – although he is one – but a great healer. It is in fact this characteristic that is considered one of the signs that he is, in fact, the destined King.

 

As another example, the primary antagonist of the entire trilogy, the Dark Lord Sauron, isn’t even seen directly at any point in the trilogy. There is a brief vision of him in a Palantir by Pippin, and a few others describe their views or visions of him, but in actuality the Big Bad never puts in an appearance in the whole trilogy. There is no dramatic confrontation, no Villain Rant, nothing. Sauron isn’t even really a character. For all the effect his personal actions have on the plot he might as well be a natural disaster or a random encounter generator. In other works, it is almost invariably the case that the Big Bad will, and must, be confronted by the Heroes at the end of the series.

 

     This kind of twisted distillation isn’t unusual, of course; in my writeup of Robert E. Howard’s work I pointed out that Conan is often envisioned by those unfamiliar with the original as a none-too-bright musclebound killing machine, while in actuality Conan was close to a genius, if not actually a genius, master of multiple languages and customs, a thief and a tactician and strategist of great skill,with his own sense of honor, decency, and fair play that often differentiated him from the so-called “civilized” people around them.

 

     The whole trilogy, in fact, spends considerable time undermining many typical tropes of adventure fiction and many myths, making victory due not to force of arms or heroic last stands or physical strength or magic, but due to little people’s dogged persistence, endurance, dedication, and essential goodness that allows them to withstand the lure of the most corruptive force in the world for vastly longer than anyone else could manage. Victory is also clearly due to moral superiority – the willingness to not kill when possible, to show mercy, and to allow for a chance of redemption, even when it seems impossible.

 

     To an extent, of course, it’s also a highly religious story. In the end, victory isn’t due to any of the Hobbits’ actions; it’s due to Smeagol/Gollum grabbing the Ring and falling off the edge, an event which is very nearly said to be due to “providence”, to in effect God making sure things worked out that way. Gandalf discusses this with Frodo – that he was meant to have the Ring, that Smeagol might still have a part to play, and so on, all words that imply the need for Faith and the existence of some sort of Grand Plan. The origin of Middle-Earth itself, told in The Silmarillion, has very strongly Christian aspects.

 

     The Lord of the Rings influenced me most strongly in the desire to, somehow, create a world that would have the same level of impact as Middle-Earth – something that would have depth and solidity so that when a reader kicked it, they’d say “wow, that feels almost real.”

 

I realized, after some attempts, that I would never achieve that by trying to duplicate Tolkien’s efforts; while I did invent some languages of my own, they were and are pale, pale imitations of what he was capable of doing, mostly existing for symbolic/flavor purposes. Instead,I had to focus on what mattered to me – making a world that worked.

 

Zarathan isn’t built on a deep linguistic base or from someone’s career-deep knowledge of real-world myth and legend, but from my desire to construct a world that makes sense to me, while still being magical and strange. The world, therefore, won’t feel like Middle-Earth in detail… yet I hope that, for some people at least, the sensation of something huge, something as big as the world itself, will cause the same little chill down their spines as I got from reading Lord of the Rings.

 

If I can achieve that, even for a moment… then I’ve learned at least some of the lessons that Professor Tolkien was trying to teach.