Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 67

On My Shelves: Galaxy Quest

 

 

“By Grabthar’s hammer… by the suns of Warvan… you shall be avenged!”

    

     Galaxy Quest is a parody and tribute to the original Star Trek (with some added flavoring from Next Generation). For those unaware of the basic “setup”, it takes place in a world like this one, in which the famous classic SF TV show was called “Galaxy Quest” which featured a fancy starship called the NESA Protector which had a crew featuring a womanizing captain, an alien science officer, and a token female communi… er, comPUTER officer,, and generated a huge fan following that continued for many years after it was cancelled. But it turns out that there are alien species out there, and some of them think that the TV episodes are reality. So naturally when a vicious alien warlord threatens them, they travel to Earth to recruit the crew of the Protector to defend them…

 

     It should be noted that I am a very hard sell when it comes to comedy and parody. Most things that people find funny leave me blinking and either saying “so?” or being actively annoyed, since most humor is based on embarrassing (or worse) other people, and most parody is very mean-spirited, mocking the original and, often, by extension those who loved it.

 

     Galaxy Quest is the shining exception to these rules.

 

     Oh, there is embarrassment, but it is in service to the characters developing and becoming more than they were, which makes all the difference. There is not, at any time, a sneer, a “looking down”, either on the fans or on the show itself. The convention depicted in the movie is – surprisingly – fairly accurate. There are even ordinary-looking families there, wandering through the convention, when many attempts to show such conventions often emphasize the “freaks”.

 

     What makes the movie, though, is the cast and the way in which they play their roles. The crew is clearly meant to echo the original Enterprise crew (with the addition of a Wesley Crusher equivalent), and they do so magnificently, with Tim Allen playing a Shatneresque actor (Jason Nesmith) at his worst, Sigourney Weaver (Gwen DeMarco) taking the Uhura-parallel as the computer officer who simply talks to the machine, and Alan Rickman (Alexander Dane) as the Token Alien equivalent of both Spock and Worf – and with the Classical Actor background that Nimoy brought to the role, plus a vast hostility for this television role that has completely overshadowed everything he has done before or since.

 

     Thrown into an impossible situation in which they are expected not to simply act as their characters, but be their characters, they react realistically and with both humor and pathos. Even accepting that these strange aliens (“Thermians”) really do both believe that they are their characters, and desperately need their help, they know how little they really know and how hopeless the situation is (made worse by Nesmith’s first drunken encounter with the Thermians and their adversary).

 

     But when they find they’re stuck in this position, the actors realize they have an opportunity to make their roles into something bigger, and something meaningful, in a way that they never could have elsewhere.

 

     There are countless nods to fandom and Star Trek in thise movie, ranging from the fans knowing more than the actors and having to be consulted in order to get the Protector home safely, to the fact that the controls on the original ship were operated in a consistent fashion because the actor made it so; George Takei explicitly decided on sequences of actions he would take whenever, for instance, the Enterprise left orbit, and maintained that consistency throughout the show (to the point that he would correct the directors if they tried to have him do it wrong).

 

The “actors frustrated with typecasting” is of course taken very much from the lives of the Trek actors; while they all appear to have come to good terms with their heritage in later years, for a while many of them truly resented Star Trek’s dominance over their careers, and understandably so. Shatner’s own behavior on the set of Trek is well-known to have annoyed and even alienated other members of the cast (though he devoted effort to trying to bridge these gaps later, and with some, though not apparently complete, success), and this is reflected in Allens portrayal of Jason Nesmith. Similarly, Sigourney Weaver expresses the same frustration with her character’s originally near-useless function as Nichelle Nichols has occasionally (and correctly) voiced with respect to Uhura, and Rickman’s Alexander Dane certainly echoes some of Nimoy’s past hostility towards the role that for years dominated any view of him as an actor.

 

But what makes Galaxy Quest really work is that it never laughs at itself. This is a subtle thing, in some ways, but many comedies seem to be extremely “conscious” of being comedies, to the point that they seem to be either saying to the audience “look, this is funny! It’s REALLy funny, isn’t it? Aren’t we clever to be so funny?” or “isn’t this shit stupid? What morons these people are!”. Both of these unspoken (and I suspect at times unintended) subtexts instantly turn me off. The latter is the worst – it’s mean-spirited mocking – but the former is still pretty bad because it eliminates the ability to actually have a story be told; we’re too busy being kicked out of the story to recognize how clever the filmmakers were.

 

Galaxy Quest takes itself seriously within its world. Oh, the situations are ridiculous… but then, so are many situations in real life. The characters aren’t above highlighting the ridiculous at times; faced with a set of pistonlike “chompers” which came from an episode in which they apparently existed purely to provide an obstacle to overcome, Gwen DeMarco says, “Well, forget it! I’m not doing it! That episode was badly written!“. But overall, it is a show with a world that has people in it, people who have problems that they have to solve and that matter  to those in that world.

 

This means that despite our laughing at their consternation at discovering real aliens think they are real starship crew, or chortling at poor Alexander Dane forced to say “That Line” again because “the show must go on”, we feel for these people. Because this world lives, rather than just winks at us, the characters can grow, can become more than they were, and have moments of heartbreak, moments of funny, and Crowning Moments of Awesome which are accented by, rather than either diminished by, or diminishing, the comedy of the show itself.

 

     Few indeed are the comedies that can claim to do anything like Galaxy Quest. And of those which might try, very, very few ever succeed.

 

     If you’ve ever watched the original Star Trek, you do need to see Galaxy Quest. If you haven’t… after watching Galaxy Quest, you might just understand why so many people have loved Star Trek, because the most powerful part of the movie wasn’t the comedy, wasn’t the parody, wasn’t even the awesome.

 

     It was the love and affection for the show that changed the lives of so many, and still does, to this day.

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: A Wrinkle in Time

 

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

 

     A Wrinkle in Time does begin with exactly that line, perhaps the most mocked opening line in literary history and certainly the most famous, courtesy of Snoopy’s eternally-rejected novel (and originally from the not-quite-as-bad-as-his-rep  Edward Bulwer-Lytton).

 

     But for A Wrinkle in Time, it’s the perfect opening line and helps set the stage, as well as foreshadowing the story to come; for there is indeed a dark and stormy time ahead for Meg Murry, high-school student (about thirteen) who just can’t seem to fit in, with the typical problems of a girl just starting the passage to adulthood, and others as well. Most prominently, her father vanished a few years before and the rumors in the town are not kind about the reason.

 

But all of that will soon seem small and inconsequential, because there are far stranger and more frightening things happening. Meg’s youngest brother, Charles Wallace, has met up with three strange people he calls “Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which”, and they have a very pointed interest in Charles Wallace and his family. Mrs. Whatsit drops by during the storm, and seems a scatterbrained, eccentric old woman… until she says to Meg’s mother, “… there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

 

Following this setup and that enigmatic line, the novel skips to the next day and introduces the third major character Calvin O’Keefe: only a year older than Meg but two grades ahead, handsome, popular, tall… and actually feeling as much alone as Meg in many ways, hiding his true self from  most of the world. The three children feel a strange connection between them. Together they visit the house where Mrs. Whatsit is supposed to live – a house with very witch-like trappings indeed. After a strange interview with the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit and her classics-quoting friend Mrs. Who which implies that they know something about Meg’s father, the three return to the Murry home. But scarcely have they gotten back when Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who appear, with the much more frightening and formidable Mrs. Which, to take them on a quest to retrieve their father from  an impossibly distant and dangerous world.

 

I just recently re-read A Wrinkle in Time as it was a book requested by my son Gabriel for his bedtime story. This was in a way fortunate since I had, not long ago, finished reading Support Your Local Wizard (omnibus of the first three Young Wizards novels by Diane Duane), which I wrote about in an earlier On My Shelves post.

 

This confirmed that there are, indeed, some interesting parallels between the books. There are three young protagonists in both (though the third doesn’t take significant part in Duane’s Young Wizards series until later in the second book); the two older protagonists become romantically involved; though they are young, they are considered crucial in the battle against evil; the powerscale implied or shown by the books can be immense; and there is some religious imagery in both.

 

However, A Wrinkle in Time is distinctly different in other ways. The religious overtones are clearer, and more overtly Christian in their depiction, with some direct statements of the involvement of “God” in events. While not a pure Christian tale like The Chronicles of Narnia, it’s still a noticeable component of the book.

 

A Wrinkle in Time is also written in a more lyrical fashion. The Young Wizards books are written in a straightforward and … realistic, so to speak, fashion. Magic is a science, the workings of the world are rational, and even the most fantastic things are still treated as being as real and tangible in the same way a car might be. By contrast, A Wrinkle in Time often uses small turns of phrase to evoke emotion and mystery, and depicts even “scientific” powers with an aura of the numinous. L’Engle’s prose style is capable of triggering powerful emotional reactions; even today, almost forty years after I first read it, I found I could not read “WWWWEEEEEE AARRRRRREEE HEEEEEEEEEERRREEE!” without feeling a chill and the prickle of goosebumps across my body.

 

At the same time, I had to come to the reluctant conclusion that, in some important ways, A Wrinkle in Time is considerably the lesser work when compared to many other books, including the Young Wizards series.

 

This is primarily due to the protagonist Meg Murry. As a character, she has great potential but is not allowed by the story to show it or, in most cases, to act. Viewed in coldly objective terms, Meg’s major interactions consist of (A) demanding to see her father or know where he is, (B) being stubborn or sulky, wondering why people aren’t doing something NOW, (C) putting herself down, and a bit later (D) taking her frustration out on those around her. Meg doesn’t take much of an active role in the book at all. The most heroic and active thing she does is work up the courage to return to confront IT. But that actual confrontation turns out to boil down to (spoilers ROT-13d just in case anyone hasn’t read the book and wants to) her telling Charles Wallace that she loves him and focusing purely on that emotion.

 

The other characters all are more active and try more to control their own course; Meg is generally dragged from point to point, and is also shown to be more vulnerable to their adversaries. This is disappointing, especially after the Young Wizards series where all three protagonists are inventive, active participants in their destinies.

 

This isn’t of course to say A Wrinkle in Time is a bad book; as I said, it has many things to recommend it, and I can certainly see why it has remained on reading lists for all these years. Yet it is, sadly, not quite as good as I had initially recalled, or quite as worthy of accolades as some others.

 

Still, I cannot help but be haunted – in a good way – by the images of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, and sometimes wonder, when I hear the thunder roar and the rain come down, what I might find in that old deserted house down the road…

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Pacific Rim

 

     Giant robots versus giant monsters. Done awesomely.

 

     I could pretty much end my review there, as it says all the important things right up front. But that would be probably overly short, and maybe just copy-and-pasting “GIANT ROBOTS versus GIANT MONSTERS” would get a little boring. Oh, and technically the title of this post should be “Going to be On My Shelves”, I suppose, because I haven’t got it yet.

 

     When I saw the trailers for Pacific Rim, I knew I’d be going to see it. But I still braced myself for disappointment; I’m no stranger to discovering that the trailers lied, or at least took the best possible pieces of the movie and presented them in a very misleading way (the 1998 Godzilla as a prime example).

 

     I was, to say the least, not disappointed.

 

     Pacific Rim didn’t have to do anything particularly special to make it watchable except to deliver its premise: Giant Robots versus Giant Monsters. But the producers evidently wanted to go beyond merely “watchable” and go for “awesome”, and so they did do more – much more – than deliver Giant Robots versus Giant Monsters.

 

     Part of delivering the awesome means you have to do something that surprises me. Now, with the basic premise revealed, you can’t surprise me with that. So what can you do? Well, you can play on my expectations of the genre. Knowing that the trailers showed battles in generally real-world locations, I assumed that it would be a fairly typical monster movie – lead-in with a few mysterious events, build them up, monster eventually appears, countermeasures are attempted, eventually they build their giant robot battlesuits and monster ass is then kicked.

 

     Instead, Pacific Rim disposes of the preliminaries in the first few minutes, showing us the emergence of the kaiju (literally “strange creature”, but commonly used in modern parlance to mean Giant Monster), their resistance to conventional weapons, and the emergence of the Jaegers (“Hunters”, the Giant Robot Battlesuits) to combat them, along with one of the key “cool details” of the operation of said suits – that they took two carefully synchronized people to operate properly.

 

     Right there the movie had my attention. This wasn’t a story of a monster or three appearing and being beaten; this was a story of a world at war on a scale undreamed of. And Pacific Rim continued to deliver. It introduced us to our hero, kills off his brother, and uses him to also show us just how badly the world is hurting, by putting him to work on a wall that is meant to keep the kaiju out – a wall which turns out to be inadequate, because the kaiju aren’t entirely dumb animals, but apparently a progressive assault of some sort. The kaiju who show up early on are much smaller and weaker; the later ones become bigger and bigger and more deadly.

 

     As it went on, Pacific Rim continued to use the basic tropes of its origin… but also to deftly modify or turn them around when useful. I particularly appreciated them minimizing the interpersonal conflict between the obvious “pair” in the plot, and in general between most people. These were a much more professional set of people than in many similar movies (though still obviously mavericks). In the end, the movie offered a picture-perfect dramatic climax and delivered it exactly as one might hope it would.

     Pacific Rim also offers some hope that, just maybe, the new Godzilla film (also from Legendary Pictures) may not suck. Legendary has at least shown that it understands the spectacle of kaiju films very, very well.

     In some ways, Pacific Rim is a live action version of one of the most famous anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, except for the fact that Pacific Rim doesn’t suck, while Evangelion is quite possibly the most overhyped and annoying disappointment in anime history. It is also a more realistic “take” on some of the combat team tokusatsu films and series, with their giant mechanized warriors fighting alien monster threats; while still inherently ridiculous, the jaeger battlesuits and kaiju monsters of Pacific Rim are both treated more seriously, and given far more budget, than any of their inspriations. This makes a huge difference.

     In addition, Pacific Rim pays attention to its secondary characters, something crucial in making the audience watch the film more than once. The support characters all have something important to contribute, and often do things that you expect… and then have different results. The strange technology (especially the “Drift” that allows two people to control a Jaeger) is not kept in isolation; implications of the technology are not ignored but are, instead, both considered and used effectively during the movie.

     Were there any flaws in Pacific Rim? Probably. I’ve only been able to see it once so far, and I recall a couple of points where I was wondering about something. I suspect I’ll find a few fumbles here and there upon rewatching. But even so, this is a marvelous film, one of a very few to attempt to take such an apparently ludicrous subject and treat it seriously enough that it becomes a serious film and not merely a parody.

     And besides, it has GIANT ROBOTS fighting GIANT MONSTERS!

     You should go see it, if you haven’t yet. It’s beautifully produced, the special effects are fantastic, Ramin Djawadi’s soundtrack kicks ass, and did I mention that there’s GIANT ROBOTS fighting GIANT MONSTERS?

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Hal Clement and _Iceworld_

 

Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) was famous throughout the Golden Age and beyond as one of the patron saints of hard science fiction. While he would allow for the existence of an FTL drive to get his protagonists to some particular location, Clement’s works were almost entirely focused on constructing worlds that, as far as we knew, didn’t exist – but could exist, based on what we knew, and from these hard-edged foundations build stories of first contact, of investigation, of exploration, and of friendship across the boundaries of worlds.

 

Clement produced a number of novels and short stories in his lifetime, of which the most famous is probably Mission of Gravity, featuring the voyage of the centipede-like Captain Barlennan across his native world of Mesklin, to humans a bizarre flattened spheroid of a world that spins so fast that gravity of several hundred times Earth’s at the poles becomes a mere 3g on the equator.

 

However, my favorite of Clement’s works remains the first of his novels I read, called Iceworld.

 

Sallman Ken is a science teacher, recruited by his planet’s government to investigate the source and nature of a hideously addictive and lethal drug which could pose a terrible risk to his people, as it appears to be addictive in a single does and able to be dispensed as a gas.

 

Because there appear to be challenging problems of both physical and perhaps chemical nature in the acquisition, storage, transport, and dispensing of this drug, the organization supplying it has been seeking people of technical capability to assist them in solving these problems. Ken, as a jack-of-all-trades scientifically, is one of the best candidates they can find (and with proper publicity prepared by the police, appears the sort of man with whom they can deal).

 

Ken quickly finds himself in far deeper than he ever expected, because he is transported in secrecy to the world from which it comes – a world so cold that normal air is a solid, a world on which no life could ever be expected to evolve… but yet something does live there, for the drug is obtained by the smugglers by trading with those somethings. The hellish conditions of that world – where ordinary metals become as fragile as glass and flexible joints become rigid, where simply exposing oneself to the outer atmosphere would be almost instantly lethal – explain why the mysterious drug has always been in terribly short supply.

 

Ken must try to convince Laj Drai, captain of the drug-runners, that he will solve their problems, while preventing them from fully succeeding, and at the same time find some way to return home with the news… all while facing the dangers of a world where sulfur is a solid and even dihydrogen monoxide a liquid.

 

Iceworld managed its reveal very well – both subtly and overtly – and was able to lead one to both become connected to the main character,and realize his essential alien nature, in a single chapter. I used the same technique – quite consciously – in writing the chapter in Phoenix Rising which introduces Poplock Duckweed.

 

I found Iceworld fascinating for a number of reasons. Here were undoubtedly alien creatures trying to understand Earth, and the description of their difficulties gave me a different perspective of my own world – a realization of how challenging the investigation of things that seem completely ordinary to us would be for someone who knows nothing of them to begin with. Sallman Ken’s methodical attempts to understand Earthly conditions were well thought out and gave me more connection to him, while he was simultaneously placed under tremendous pressure to find a way to increase production of the drug “tofacco” by Laj Drai.

 

The book also counterpoints Ken’s adventures with the activities of the Wing family on Earth, who happen to be the people with whom Drai made unwitting contact years before. The Wings could prove to be the real key to Ken’s success – if Ken can figure out how to communicate with them.

 

The interaction of the two species was also one of the things that most interested me. Here were two sets of people, so physically different that were either one to step into the environment of the other they would die almost instantly, yet still clearly people of the same basic kind. Sure, Sallman Ken breathes sulfur and drinks, occasionally, copper chloride, but in basic feelings, drives, and personal honor and morality he’s not very different from us at all. His people are recognizable and believable as people, which makes it possible to tell most of the story from his point of view without requiring the reader to somehow come to an understanding of a completely alien viewpoint.

 

Some people might consider that a failing (though possibly forgiving it for being written in the Golden Age); I considered, and still consider, it to be an advantage. Not only is it a useful approach for storytelling, but also it reflects my general belief with respect to aliens, if they do exist. They’ll have to go through similar problems, and create similar solutions to them, that we have over your evolution, and I believe that if we ever encounter alien intelligences, we will eventually find that no matter how bizarre and even frightening their exteriors, inside they will be not all that different from us.

 

I was fortunate enough to meet Hal Clement twice. The first time was many years ago, as a very young man, when he was attending one of the Albany-based conventions (I’m not quite sure which one) on Wolf Road. I came across him in a side room, where – in retrospect – he had obviously come to get away from the noise and bustle for a while.

 

Despite that, he never once gave me the impression of feeling I had intruded; he listened to my typical fanboy blathering, gently critiqued some world-design concepts that I had, and in general made me feel as though we were equals, rather than telling me that he needed to be left alone for a while.

 

I saw him for the second, and final, time at Albacon 2003; I was able to thank him then for his amazing and wonderful tolerance and courtesy that day, and greet him as a newly-minted member of the SF author fraternity. He was once more as gracious, pleasant, and friendly as I remembered, and solidified in me the determination to remember that this was what an author should be like at a convention.

 

I was more fortunate than I realized at the time to have seen him at that convention; for on October 29th, 2003, only a few weeks after I had spoken with him, Hal Clement – Harry Stubbs – passed on.

 

Hal Clement gave me – and us – many excellent stories, and was a demonstration that one can build worlds using only the tools that the real world gives us and still tell exciting SF stories. He was also a personal example to me of the way an author – or any public figure, really – should interact with his or her fans, and I hope I will never forget his lesson.

 

And I will always be most fond of Iceworld, especially for one last part of it: that he left the story open, showing that while Sallmen Ken’s mission might have been completed, the true story was only beginning.

 

 

 

 

Under the Influence: Lord of the Flies

 

 

For those who know me, this entry’s title may come as a shock. “Ryk, you hated Lord of the Flies! How can you list it as an influence?”

 

Well, sometimes things that really suck can influence you, too.

 

For those (fortunately) unfamiliar with Lord of the Flies, it is something of a deconstruction of the “shipwrecked people” subgenre of stories (codified by Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Mysterious Island) and often said to be specifically a response to The Coral Island. In it, a number of British boys are marooned on an island. Instead of working together to survive, they quickly separate into two groups – one (weaker) trying to maintain some form of civilized order, and the other, composed mostly of the bigger kids, degenerating into tribal savagery – over a period that appears to be weeks, no more than a few months.

 

This is not (in case you hadn’t guessed) the sort of book I’d choose to read on my own. It was one of the books assigned us in high school (10th grade, if I recall correctly). Reading Lord of the Flies was a textbook (pardon the pun) example of the torment that is assigned reading. The book managed to be simultaneously dull as ditchwater, horrific, and hair-tearingly wrong in multiple ways. But it was an assigned book and I dragged my way through the whole mess, right up to the end where the survivors are found by a completely clueless Naval officer.

 

The novel offended me on multiple levels – and not in a good way, as some novels that offend can manage. I didn’t agree with Golding’s basic premise (the inherent savagery of mankind – I think the existence of civilization itself is an absolute and conclusive disproof of that premise). I didn’t agree with the way in which he explored his premise (I didn’t believe the actions or the way in which they progressed). And I was specifically annoyed when details crucial to the plot itself were physically impossible.

 

The most significant of these issues was the use of the nearsighted character Piggy’s glasses to start fires; the glasses of farsighted people can be used as magnifying glasses and thus burning glasses, but nearsighted people’s glasses (like mine and Piggy’s) disperse the light, they don’t concentrate it.

 

If that were simply a side issue in the plot – i.e., there were many ways for them to make fire and they just happened to use the glasses – it would simply have been a minor facepalm “did not do the research” moment. But the glasses, and their ability to start fires, are a major plot point; the savage group of boys attack the civilized ones specifically to capture the glasses for firemaking, after they were previously used to start the fires earlier in the book.

 

Piggy himself is probably one of the reasons I really violently detested the novel. In many ways he was almost an avatar of me; I was bullied, weak, highly intelligent, wore very thick glasses, and suffered from asthma. The major differences between us were that I was skinny as a sheet of paper in those days, while Piggy was fat, and I was more willing to confront people (even those much more physically capable than I was).

 

But instead of using his intellect, which was mentioned multiple times, Piggy became a passive resource, and his “intelligence” became what TVTropes calls an “informed ability” – something the text told us, but his actions didn’t confirm. This frustrated me as a reader no end because I could see – and even at the characters’ ages would have seen – multiple other things that the group could and should try to do, and that might have averted some of the conflicts. Instead, the “good guys” – Ralph, Piggy, Simon, and the younger kids – were universally depicted as ineffective, weak, and stupider than they should be, while Jack, almost singlehandedly, manages to undermine everything they do.

 

“We get it, Ryk, we get it, you hate the book. How’s this influential?”

 

Lord of the Flies was the book that taught me one of the most valuable lessons that any young reader needs to learn: you don’t have to finish books that suck. Admittedly, I only came to this realization after finishing it, but I was able to apply that principle very shortly thereafter (to the next assigned book, A Separate Peace) and I have stuck by it ever since. At the time, though, it was a revelation; I’d finished every other book I picked up, even those I didn’t like. But I finally realized that my reading time was limited, and I shouldn’t have to spend it in pain.

 

In terms of writing, this novel also helped me articulate for the first time what I felt I believed about people. It’s somewhat funny, perhaps, given that I was myself bullied extensively as a youngster; many people in similar circumstances have said that those experiences made them feel that Lord of the Flies was deadly accurate in its depiction of people.

 

But I didn’t agree. When I thought about it, I realized my disagreement came from two divergent sources. First, I really feel that on average people are more constructive and cooperative than divisive and destructive; if that were not true, how could we ever have left the caves and plains where we evolved? We’d never have gotten beyond the “bash people over the head” stage. Thus, Lord of the Flies was directly arguing with my most essential belief in humanity in general.

 

But the second was a much more technical issue. I simply didn’t believe the story. Even accepting the postulate, I didn’t think things would work that way. Honestly, I would have expected an attempt to build a raft to escape the island which would have drowned most of the kids or left them drifting, to indulge in cannibalism later. (Insert your own Monty Python “Still No Sign Of Land” joke here)

 

This told me that what made a story work wasn’t just agreeing with what it said, but making the story’s events agree with what the reader’s expectations would be.

 

The incident of the glasses-that-couldn’t-light-fires also solidified a related conviction: your world has to make sense. If it doesn’t make sense to the reader, nothing that happens in it will matter. In a story set in what is ostensibly our world, using mundane objects like glasses wrongly is a grave error, because a number of your readers know better – or will know better in four seconds after they read that passage and say “wow, I didn’t know I could start fires with my glasses!” and then discover they can’t.

 

If you’re writing SF/F and you’re talking about something that doesn’t exist in the real world, well, you have an advantage over poor Golding; there’s no one in your readership who can say “Hey, magic doesn’t work like that at all!” and be able to prove it. But the related principle – and one that is at the heart of all worldbuilding – is consistency and limitations. Your world must be self-consistent – if action A leads to consequence B, and consequence B implies that consequence C should also follow, then you’d darn well better have consequence C… or a good reason why consequence C won’t happen.

 

Limitations are related to consistency, in that they are part of the key parts of the world description. Your new shiny technology, or magic, has to have limitations of some sort, or your characters (or their opponents, if it’s the bad guys who have the technology or magic in question) are literally unstoppable gods at worst, or at best can simply pull out some new trick whenever the plot absolutely demands it, with nothing to give the reader an expectation of this new trick.

 

Lionel Fanthorpe was legendary for this kind of thing, just pulling out new technobabble to solve a problem his characters had; perhaps the most infamous example was the Flaz Gaz Heat Ray, a superweapon literally taken out of a cabinet at the last minute of a battle and used to wipe out the enemy in two seconds. No prior mention of the Heat Ray had ever been made, no implication of such technology was in the prior text, it was simply and solely a matter of “I’m almost to the end of the story length and my characters need to win, I’ll give them a new super weapon. It’s science fiction, after all!”

 

Paradoxically, of course, the issue of Piggy and his glasses demonstrates the other side of the coin: you can easily get something wrong when you don’t know that you don’t know it. This is a hard, hard problem, and not one that any author can fully avoid. You can’t research everything, and the things that will trip you up are the things that you think you already know enough; you’ll spend your research effort on things you know you don’t understand.

 

The same issue also shows that there are a huge number of different audiences for any given book, and details which will alienate some are utter non-issues for others. I know many other people who found the “glasses” issue to be highly annoying, but I also know many who are utterly bemused by the fact that I care about the issue at all; to them it’s just a minor detail that hasn’t any relevance to the book itself.

 

But though I hated (and still hate) Lord of the Flies, I have to conclude that, through experiencing it, I was influenced in both my reading and writing life, significantly enough that I cannot help but acknowledge that influence.

 

Still, I really wish this depressing piece of crap would be taken off assigned reading lists. But for some reason it seems that only depressing pieces of crap are ALLOWED on assigned reading lists, for the most part. (I recall one piece of assigned reading I enjoyed: To Kill a Mockingbird).

 

I obviously do not recommend this book, except possibly as kindling if you are ever marooned on a desert island.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The Incredibles

 

There are very few movies – or, indeed, stories of any sort – which approach perfection. The Incredibles, Pixar’s superhero-themed offering, is one of those few.

 

Make no mistake – most of Pixar’s work has been stellar, and even their worst products have managed to be entertaining. This is a track record unmatched by any other studio I can think of. But even within Pixar’s oeuvre, The Incredibles stands out.

 

I remember seeing the original advertisements – teasers – featuring Mr. Incredible getting a call from “the red phone” and trying to get into his now-too-small super-suit. Those were certainly clever and amusing, and contained some hints of what was to come.

 

But they failed to get across the depth of story that Pixar intended to bring to what – at first glance – appeared to be a simple superhero spoof. Instead, we got a serious story which just happened, from the external viewer’s perspective, to contain a number of very funny aspects. But there is little funny in-world in the story; the characters and world itself take themselves perfectly seriously.

 

In this, it is very similar to Galaxy Quest – the Star Trek parody-cum-salute which succeeded with me where very, very few comedies ever do (and I’ll review that one later, too). This is the key to what made The Incredibles work: it built a world for the people to inhabit, and made those people believable within that world (no matter how peculiar that world might be to us).

 

The Incredibles is certainly a superhero-oriented story in many ways. Yet that is only a part of what it is. One of its strongest aspects is that it is, in truth, a story of a family – of a man trying to find himself when lost in a world that seems to have no place for him, of a woman who also has lost herself in a similar, yet different, manner, and of two children who don’t know if the world will ever have a place for them. It’s a story of being true to oneself… and true to those who depend on you,and on whom you depend.

 

In addition, it is also a spoof and salute to the spy movie genre; it is, very much, James Bond meets the Fantastic Four (the Incredibles map well to the Four, with the exception that the Human Torch is replaced by a speedster; the character traits, though, are quite similar). Michael Giacchino deliberately plays on this with his soundscore; it is highly reminiscent more of James Bond themes than it is of superhero-associated music, with some key moment exceptions.

 

Syndrome himself is unmistakably a nod to the classic Bond adversaries – a madman with immense technological resources, in a secret base with a charming femme fatale as his “face” to the world; all that’s missing is him sitting there stroking a white cat. To be fair to the other genre, though, there are certainly a lot of supervillains which share many of these traits, and Syndrome riffs on them too.

 

But it is the people that carry the story – ranging from the Parr family itself to the repulsively officious Mr. Humph, Syndrome, Mirage, Rick Dicker, Kari the babysitter… and of course the brilliantly self-absorbed Edna Mode. Each of the people, even some of the side characters we encounter, carries the weight of reality with them, somehow, even when – like Edna and Syndrome – they are also symbols and archetypes.

 

The Incredibles is, perhaps, the single most quotable movie I’ve ever seen, with almost every character getting at least one and often many bon mots to quote with amusement and sometimes wonder.

 

Like Speed Racer, though, it is at its heart a family story, about a family that may have some unique problems, but whose strength lies in that family and the support they can give each other. When one of them hides, or tries to hide, some essential action or part of themselves, it leads to disaster; only by trusting each other, by allowing themselves to be themselves at least within the confines of the family, can they be truly strong. Bob Parr states this flat-out near the end of the movie: “I can’t lose you again! I’m not strong enough…”. Ironically, the situation in which he was saying that was one in which he was, once again, making a mistake – not realizing that his family, superpowered all, would be far stronger fighting together than remaining separate.

 

It does occasionally occur to me that The Incredibles is not, really, about Mr. Incredible and his family, nor about Syndrome, but really about the fabulous Edna Mode. Her entire world was destroyed when the supers were outlawed. “I used to design for GODS!“

 

She knows all of the supers through this connection – she knows their powers, their personalities, their preferences and modus operandi. It seems utterly likely that she would keep tabs on her old clients, and nurse a grudge against the world for taking her career from her.

 

She wants it all back. So it is natural that if she saw an opportunity, she’d take it.

 

Syndrome then appears. It seems very likely that he went to her for his costume – he would undoubtedly have researched who the “tailor to the supers” was… and would also undoubtedly been enough of a pain to get her to supply him with a suit… with a cape.

 

Soon she notes that her old clients are disappearing. She, alone, knew the secret identities of all of the heroes; even the government agents probably only knew a few of them each. She is also a super-genius (look at what she has to achieve making the costumes).

 

So she calmly, cold-bloodedly plans to arrange the return of the era of the Supers. She repairs Bob’s costume… but not flawlessly, which she could undoubtedly have done. She ensures there is a tracking device on Bob’s suit which sends out a loud, easily detected signal upon cue. She can of course silently track where Bob’s been going… and match that with her annoying customer Syndrome. She arranges Elastigirl’s visit at the precise time needed to get Bob trapped, and shoves her out the door with instructions to get Bob back, literally slapping her out of a relationship-based breakdown to get her back on track.

 

The unexpected appearance of Elastigirl (with two super-powered children) adds the needed disruptive element into Syndrome’s careful planning. Until now, Syndrome has carefully, methodically arranged the arrival of each super, prepared all countermeasures to deal with them, and so on. For the first time, he is forced to quickly improvise means to neutralize three additional supers for which he has not planned and hasn’t had time to study. This allows them to escape shortly after Syndrome launches, and thus follow and defeat him publicly, giving the supers back the public’s support.

 

     Edna’s goals are achieved, and “all that has transpired here has done so according to my fabulous design, darling.”

 

     I rather doubt this, myself, but it’s an amusing thought that goes through my mind every time I watch.

 

     If you’ve never watched The Incredibles, you really should. If you have… maybe you should watch it again.

 

     I think I will.

 

 

 

 

Under the Influence: Eric Frank Russell

 

 

There may be no other author who I can sincerely say has had a direct influence on me as a writer through as few works as Eric Frank Russell. While I have since read quite a few of his works – the Jay Score stories, “MacHinery”, “Now Inhale”, and others – his actual influence on me comes from two short stories: “Legwork” and “Hobbyist”.

 

“Hobbyist” is the story of Steve Anders, an exploration pilot whose ship encounters a spatial disturbance of immense power, throwing him so far from home that by the time he finds a planet he can land on, he’s effectively out of fuel (in this case, nickel-thorium wire is the fuel). As he explores the planet, accompanied only by a parrot named Laura, he discovers that he is not alone. Something else lives here, and in a building of stunning size and mysterious purpose it does… something. But inside that building may be what Steve needs to get home…

 

“Legwork” is two stories: that of alien criminal Vanash, called a “hypno” but what we today would call a telepath of tremendous power, able to control minds at a range of a good chunk of a mile, and of the human beings trying to track someone who seems able to commit crimes in a thousand different guises, all perfect, all unimpeachable, all vanishing as soon as their business is done.

 

 Vanash is a spy from Andromeda (whether from an actual galactic-scale civilization or from some planet in Andromeda is unclear)and spends his time surveying Earth so that his people will understand the capabilities and behaviors of this little world. Vanash’s illusions are so perfect that there is nowhere he cannot go safely and without question; he can appear to be anyone and anything, and eliminate any question or confusion in his targets (or, indeed, cause confusion, if he desires). This ability is – rightly – considered sufficient by Vanash for both offense and defense. If you can’t penetrate the illusion you can be killed easily, and you will never be able to actually strike the real Vanash.

 

But Vanash’s people are only a loose association, really; they work on the assumption of genius and talent, the need for particularly gifted individuals to solve particular new problems. What they don’t use, nor understand, is a peculiarly human approach to solving problems: systematic, patient, methodical, plodding, workaday grind, doing it all the hard way… by “legwork”…

 

“Legwork” was, perhaps, the real start of my interest in mystery novels, and certainly of the “crime procedural” – one in which the reader may or may not know who or what committed the crime, and the focus is on how the police manage to track down the perpetrator regardless of how prepared, clever, or special he may be. The human investigators of “Legwork” follow both routine and the dictums of fictional investigators such as Sherlock Holmes, recognizing that when facing something extraordinary, you cannot dismiss extraordinary answers. Slowly but surely they come to understand what they are dealing with, and prepare to trap an almost uncatchable foe – one whose powers turn out to be just barely limited enough.

 

This story also demonstrated the need to think “around” a problem that was supernatural in effect – if you wanted human beings to knock down something that seemed much more powerful, it was vital that you explicitly let the reader know what limits that supernatural (whether magical or SF or otherwise in nature) power had, so that the human hero could reasonably be expected to figure out some way to deal with the being. In that sense, many of my Jason Wood stories are direct spiritual descendants of “Legwork”.

 

“Hobbyist” was an inspiration in atmosphere. In some ways, this short story carried off the feeling of being marooned and beyond help better than many novels based around a similar concept, and then segued into a creepy horror-novel type atmosphere that still kept an edge of hard scientific exploration… and then flavored it with an inspiring sense of wonder. I’ve encountered very few writers who could manage all of those at all, let alone manage to cram them all into a short story!

 

“Hobbyist” was so inspirational in this area that it directly inspired the beginning of the first novel I ever wrote, a terrible Mary-Sueish pastiche that started as Eric Frank Russell and quickly diverted to mostly Doc Smith. But perhaps not so oddly, the beginning of that abysmal novel remained readable, because it was focused on the problem and challenges of an ordinary human being trapped in an impossible position. And though that story was unpublishable, the spirit, and the thoughts that inspired it, remained, and continued… and still drive me today.

 

I never met Mr. Russell myself, something true of many of my other inspirations. But he lives on in his stories… and, perhaps, a bit of him in mine, as well.

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Support Your Local Wizard (Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series)

 

 

     I had read the first book, and part of the second, of this trilogy (So You Want to be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, and High Wizardry) many years ago, but recently I picked up this omnibus and read it to my son Gabriel.

 

     The basic concept of the series is that wizards have a task of supporting the basic order of the universe, in essence attempting to minimize or even reverse entropy. Nita Callahan is a young girl (12 to early teens) whose major love is reading, and who runs across a strange book titled “So You Want To Be a Wizard”… which turns out to be exactly what it appears, a guide to becoming a wizard, someone who can control and direct the forces of the world with word and gesture and symbol. But becoming a wizard is a solemn and deadly serious affair, and when she – and her new friend Kit Rodriguez – take the Oath of Wizardry and begin actually practicing magic, they are plunged directly into the conflicts between mortal wizards, the great Powers which help control the workings of the universe, and the Lone Power who chose to invent death and entropy and now opposes all others.

 

     These books have on occasion been compared to the Harry Potter series, and there are certainly similarities; the age group is similar, the existence of a secret world of organized magicians who maintain the secrecy of their existence, hidden magical creatures and effects in the world, and the fact that the child wizards swiftly become involved in affairs far out of the league that we associate with children of their ages, these also are very similar elements.

 

     But the Young Wizards books are otherwise very different. While great skill at wizardry naturally comes with long practice, it turns out that sheer power at wizardry is associated with youth, and both Nita and Kit are very, very young for wizards. (later on Nita’s sister Dairine becomes a wizard, and being even younger than Nita is immensely powerful). Moreover, the Oath of Wizardry immediately triggers a sort of destiny, a testing and a mission or Ordeal, which is placed upon the newborn wizard. In the case of Nita and Kit, their first true mission takes them literally to another universe – and into a direct confrontation with the Lone Power itself!

 

     This is not at all dissimilar to the situation seen in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and there are a number of similarities in feel between these books and Wrinkle, as well as some clear Christian-related parallels – the Lone Power is at least in one aspect Lucifer, the Fallen Angel, even though he is also other dark gods or spirits of legend, while Wrinkle also has strange alien forces that at the same time clearly are linked to something very much like Christian mythology. The world that Kit and Nita find themselves in for their Ordeal, too, is a world twisted to the desires and needs of the One Power, just as Camazotz was shaped by the desires of IT.

 

     At the same time, there are huge differences. Nita and Kit are active forces, even when they’re still trying to figure out what they can do, and how they can do it. They have the inherent power to affect the world around them, and they can, and will, use it. In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murray’s major power to fight evil is more a matter of emotion and faith. And while both series of books put their protagonists into the middle of potentially cosmic forces, the powerscale of the Young Wizards books becomes… huge.

 

     The three books deal with multiple serious issues of choices, death, life, and even touches on other issues such as sex (even if mostly by denial on the part of the two main characters that they are doing anything in that area; one cannot blame their parents for wondering, though, when an adolescent girl and boy start going off alone together for extended periods of time).

 

     There are also numerous Crowning Moments of Awesome in the series; without spoiling too much, I will say that there’s few things more cool than bringing all the statues of New York City to life to do battle with evil. And that’s just one part of one battle.

 

     The powerscale and the stakes in these books are not for the fainthearted; Nita, Kit, and eventually Dairine confront threats and make choices that would give even major superheroes pause – while at the same time remaining children.

 

     The latter is one of the key parts of the series. Nita and Kit are very believable, authentic, geeky kids who’ve happened to be dragged into something vastly larger – that uses and needs their sense of wonder to achieve great things. They worry about their parents, and staying out too late, and doing homework, dealing with bullies, keeping secrets, and everything normal… even while they end up playing in a game whose stakes can be larger than their entire world.

 

     These are wonderful books, beautifully written and powerfully plotted. They have few, if any, slow spots.

 

     The only real flaws are occasional lapses on the part of the author of either knowledge or research, where words are either used incorrectly, or numbers/information is inaccurate or simply don’t make sense (depths in fathoms that imply that several whales plus a gigantamongous shark of doom are all swimming around AND OVER each other in about 40 feet of water; the detonation of something stated to well outmass our sun at a range that should actually end up vaporizing the planet, but instead just makes a bright light, etc.), but these are, honestly, minor failings. They made me twitch when I encountered them, but none of them caused me to do more than grumble internally; the story and characters were more than powerful enough to keep me going past these minor speedbumps.

 

     I strongly recommend this omnibus and the books of which it is composed. I haven’t read the later books in the series yet but I would be surprised if they are not of the same quality. Go, join Nita and Kit as they take the Oath of Wizardry… and save the world.

 

 

 

 

 

On My Shelves: The Paper Dragon

 

     This is undoubtedly the shortest book I’ve yet reviewed, a children’s picture book which has been a favorite of all my kids. The Paper Dragon, like another I will discuss at some point (Shibumi and the Kitemaker, by Mercer Mayer), tells a fictional tale in the style of older storytelling traditions of the Eastern countries such as China and Japan (or, at least, if this particular tale is a real folktale, I can’t find reference to it other than this book).

 

     In the story, a painter by the name of Mi Fei is chosen by his village to confront the great dragon Sui Jen, who has awakened from his sleep and is destroying everything in the region. Mi Fei is chosen because he is also a writer – he produces painted scrolls which tell the tales of gods and heroes, and thus is the one who knows the most about how monsters might be overcome.

 

     Mi Fei is very loyal to his village and loves its people, so despite feeling utterly inadequate to the task he accepts the mission and confronts Sui Jen. The Dragon, while a force of destruction, is not inherently evil, and tells Mi Fei that “before I return to my ageless slumber, someone must perform three tasks.”

 

     This is of course a classic adventure setup, but rather than be sent on a great quest, Mi Fei is forced to unravel three challenging puzzles, one every twelve hours, or Sui Jen will devour him. I won’t reveal specifics at this point because the puzzles and their solution by Mi Fei are charming and elegant, and obviously deliberately chosen by Sui Jen to challenge Mi Fei specifically – that is, if someone else had faced the Dragon, Sui Jen would have had different challenges for them to overcome.

 

     This being a children’s story, you can be sure that somehow Mi Fei triumphs. What makes this book stand out from among many others is that he does so in a manner that relies both on old knowledge – in essence, studying books, learning from the past – and on clever insight in the present. Mi Fei’s great learning is crucial to his success – and so is his great compassion and love for his own people, his home, and his humility and willingness to see beyond the immensity of this task to the simplicity of the situation.

 

There are also several clever references hidden within the book. For instance, the name “Sui Jen” (“Fire Driller” or “Fire Maker”; the Dragon actually calls himself “The Source of Fire, the Heart of the Mountain”) is actually the name of a very ancient Chinese mythological figure who can be best described as a parallel to the Greek figure of Prometheus, a being who brought the secret of fire to mankind.

 

As another example, the entire description of Sui Jen – the mountain on which he dwells, the fact that he sleeps for long periods only to awaken destructively, and the type of destruction he creates – is very clearly, and I’m sure deliberately, evocative of a volcanic eruption. Sui Jen sends “great winds” that flatten houses and rip trees up, with “fiery breath” that sets the towns on fire, and great force of presence that “tramples the fields”. Mi Fei arrives at Lung Mountain to see the top wreathed in smoke and flames, with rocks bouncing down its sides.

 

The book is beautiful – done in the painting style that, presumably, Mi Fei himself is supposed to be using, with just enough added detail to bring out a clear picture of villagers, hero, and adversary. It is also designed in a unique way – all but the last page of the book are fold-out pages with the printing on the BACK of the foldout, so you can show the whole page to children without having to turn the book back to you to read.

 

But to me the greatest strength of The Paper Dragon is its powerful message that anyone can be a hero, if they keep their wits about them, and that a hero isn’t necessarily a mighty warrior, but someone who does what they know must be done… and who may battle with words, and paper, and courage rather than swords and shields.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women and the Adventurer’s Census (Kicking Ass and Taking Names)

 

     I’ve on occasion been asked “what made you decide to have a woman as your main action character?”, or something to that effect. Honestly, I don’t really work that way. I don’t sit down and say “Hey, I should write a story with a character that is X”. I think of some neat story idea, and the characters I create are the ones that fit the story.

 

     That said, I suppose the fact is that it would never have occurred to me NOT to have at least some of my stories with truly kickass heroines. Looking over my books published thus far (and currently in the pipeline), about the only one that didn’t have a pretty badass woman as a major, if not lead, character was my first novel, Digital Knight, and even there, the apparently-fluffy new-age Sylvia Stake manages to lay out a werewolf with a kick to the nether regions (silver-toed boots), helps her new husband face down the origin of the Medusa legend, and single-handedly breaks out of an entire household of demonic entities that were planning on holding her hostage, and instead end up dead at the hands of their would-be prisoner.

 

     In my collaborations with Eric Flint, we had Jodi from Diamonds Are Forever who fights right alongside her fiancee Clint and faces down a monstrous rock-creature with nothing but an operatic-level voice, and Madeline Fathom, delicate-looking blonde secret agent in the Boundary series who is beyond doubt the most formidable person encountered in all three books.

 

     My other solo works – Grand Central Arena and Phoenix Rising – have as front-and-center truly badass women. Grand Central Arena‘s primary mover is Captain Ariane Austin, once just a daredevil racing pilot, now by default the leader of the small group of humans trapped in the Arena, who has to find a way to lead her people home – and in the end has to face a nearly invincible opponent in personal, one-on-one combat for the chance. She may not be the most physically formidable of the people we meet – that would probably be her mysterious right-hand man, Marc C. DuQuesne, and in the sequel Spheres of Influence we would have to add the Hyperion Monkey King, Sun Wu Kung – but she is the one on whom all success rests.

 

     Phoenix Rising centers around Kyri Victoria Vantage, who is chosen by her god Myrionar as its last hope to revive its religion and save its people. In her quest for justice and vengeance against those who killed her parents and her brother, Kyri – and eventually two companions, Tobimar Silverun (Seventh of Seven, exiled Prince of Skysand)  and Poplock Duckweed (intelligent Toad with a knack for poking his nose where it doesn’t belong) – end up facing the driving forces behind a conspiracy that spans their entire continent.

 

     To me, it wasn’t a choice to make these characters female. They simply were.

 

     That probably comes from my reading as a child. While I certainly hold in high esteem many pieces of writing that are wholly or to a great extent dominated by male heroic figures (such as the works of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Asimov, Niven, etc.), some of my earliest favorites were filled with female heroes. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum, for example, were dominated by girl heroes – Dorothy, Trot, Betsy, Polychrome, Ozma – and even the less-frequent male heroes were either accompanied by a female, or often needed help from (sometimes more sensible) females such as Glinda the Good. Dorothy walked through perils and overcame her fears with a wide-eyed, invincible innocence, kindness, and determination that did not allow for the possibility of failure. The young boy Pip survives multiple harrowing adventures to discover that he really isn’t “he” at all, but the shapechanged form of Ozma, the true ruler of Oz. Trot and her friend and companion Cap’n Bill survive everything from a maelstrom to being lost underground to being shrunk to the size of a berry and confronting a true Wicked Witch, always with Trot’s calm faith supporting her and those around her.

 

     The “Little House” books, based on the actual life of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, emphasized these things to me; here was a real little girl who might have lived a hundred and more years ago, but was just like me, or the me I’d like to be, in many ways – curious, sometimes getting herself into trouble, courageous, willing to handle hardship for the sake of her family, and sometimes willing to strike out at those who hurt her, because it had to be done.

 

     Later reading that I chose just reinforced my basic assumptions that – when it came to heroism – there was no difference at all between boys and girls. The Danny Dunn series had Irene Miller, the perfect balance between the irrepressible Danny and the gloomy Joe – a girl as physically capable as either boy, and possibly even smarter than Danny, the putative main character. Nancy Drew and her friends were always able to crack the case, even when the adults around them didn’t see the solution. Alice didn’t need anyone’s help in Wonderland.

 

`    One of my favorite science fiction authors – and one who, indirectly, led to my own publication – was James Schmitz. Schmitz’ most famous work is probably The Witches of Karres, which features the titular Witches in strong secondary positions, but the work of Schmitz’ that influenced me most was the Telzey Amberdon series, featuring a teenage girl who suddenly develops powerful psionic abilities which plunge her into multiple potentially deadly adventures.

Schmitz also gave me The Demon Breed (AKA The Tuvela) in which a smart scientist manages to, quite literally, terrorize an entire group of alien invaders until they flee, convinced that she is some sort of superhuman monster, and the Trigger Argee series, whose young heroine has no special powers but still manages to perform as capably as any space-opera hero.

 

     Some iconic images in other media tended to stick with me, too: Jaime Sommers, the Bionic Woman, former tennis-pro turned teacher and sometime secret agent, who was more than capable of handling top-secret missions all by herself with no man to do the handholding; Ellen Ripley, terrified by her first encounter with alien monsters and instead of turning away from it, transforming herself into what may be one of the most iconic badass figures in all modern cinema; Velma from Scooby-Doo, always smarter than everyone else around her and the one who cracked every case in the end.

 

     I also was a roleplaying gamer since the late 1970s, and one of my earliest influences there was a gamer named Steve Reed. Steve played female characters more often than male characters, and did so with such absolute nonchalance and normality that it never seemed “odd” to me, though it apparently did to some other people. I ended up playing almost a perfect split – something like 48% male, 48% female, and the remaining 4% things for which the sex wasn’t terribly relevant (an intelligent toad in a group of humanoids, a shapeshifting blob, an automaton).

 

     So when it came to writing, it honestly rarely occurs to me that I’m writing “a woman” as a character. I’m writing a person, who may be male or female. The main characters will naturally kick ass – it’s their job! And thus some of them will, and must, be women. They’re half the human world, they’ve got as much reason to defend it as the men do. And defend it they will, matching the others stride for stride, strike for strike, strength for strength.