Richard Lee Byers's Blog, page 58
October 20, 2011
Win a book!
http://www.stonehill.org/necro.htm
October 18, 2011
Long Live Transylvania
http://airlockalpha.com/node/8733/astrojive-long-live-transylvania.html
October 17, 2011
I'll be at Necronomicon
Necronomicon is a fun general-interest SF, fantasy, gaming, and horror convention with plenty of interesting programming. If you're in the area, it's worth checking out, and if you do, I hope you'll look me up and say hi.
http://www.stonehill.org/necro.htm
October 10, 2011
Writing the mastermind villain
http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/10/smarter-faster-meaner-richard-lee-byers-on-writing-mastermind-villains.html
While I'm posting, let me also say thanks to Linda Cowden, who runs the Author programming, and to everyone at Spooky Empire for a good time this past weekend.
October 7, 2011
Spooky Empire
http://www.spookyempire.com/
June 7, 2010
PRINCESS OF MARS
I don't know that anyone was waiting impatiently for my next blog entry. But on theory that someone may have been, I should apologize once again for a lengthy absence. Between working on my next novel, some other projects, and attending to my online teaching gig, I just couldn't get my act together to blog.
But I finally found myself inspired by Princess of Mars, a release from The Asylum that aired on SyFy Saturday night. I've never made it all the way through a movie produced by The...
PRINCESS OF MARS
I don't know that anyone was waiting impatiently for my next blog entry. But on theory that someone may have been, I should apologize once again for a lengthy absence. Between working on my next novel, some other projects, and attending to my online teaching gig, I just couldn't get my act together to blog.
But I finally found myself inspired by Princess of Mars, a release from The Asylum that aired on SyFy Saturday night. I've never made it all the way through a movie produced by The Asylum, so as you can imagine, my expectations were modest. But when I was a kid, I thought Edgar Rice Burroughs was the greatest writer who ever lived, and since the movie is based on his novel A Princess of Mars, I figured I'd give it a shot.
It turned out to be fairly bad, but not as bad as the other Asylum movies I've tried to watch. It deserves some credit for trying to incorporate many elements of the original story. It serves up a seemingly dying John Carter transported to an arid world where low gravity makes him a superman, marauding green men wandering the wasteland on monstrous steeds called thoats, flying ships, and the threat of death on a planetary scale if somebody can't get the atmosphere plant working again.
And Antonio Sabato, Jr. makes a pretty decent John Carter. With the arguable exception of Tarzan, a somewhat more complex character, Burroughs's heroes are all pretty much the same guy. They're handsome, muscular, fearless, virtuous, have a great capacity for love and friendship, and possess a wry, down-to-earth sense of humor. Sabato delivers all this. He even looks quite a bit like John Carter as he was depicted on the covers of the Ballantine paperback reprints where I first encountered him.
While I like Traci Lords, her Dejah Thoris is a harder sell. Martians of her race are supposed to have coppery skin and black hair, and Dejah herself is supposed to be not just beautiful but flawlessly, astonishingly beautiful. (When reading the books, I imagined Sophia Loren or Raquel Welch with the appropriate pigmentation.) Attractive though she is, the blond Ms. Lords just diverges too far from my mental picture, and I suspect most of Burroughs's readers would say the same. She also does a fair job of portraying Dejah's royal hauteur and strength in adversity but doesn't do as good a job of revealing the human warmth and passion we're eventually supposed to see inside.
A bigger problem, though, is a story that often fails to make sense. Sometimes, perhaps, this is because it doesn't supply the exposition that would explain why things happen. Other times, I'm pretty sure, it's because shit just doesn't make sense.
Now admittedly, portions of the novel don't make sense, either. But some of those elements are overtly mystical, and that makes it somewhat more acceptable that we can't explain them. By providing more of a conventional sci-fi explanation for how Carter is flung to Mars and then drawn back to Earth again, but doing a lousy job of rationalizing how and why it all works, the movie ends up making itself look less plausible, not more.
As I mentioned previously, I do give the movie credit for using a fair amount of Burroughs's original story. And given that this is a low-budget film, I understand why the green men aren't fifteen feet tall and don't have four arms and eyes on stalks. But there are some other unfortunate changes that seem unrelated to questions of cost.
For example, in the book, the green men are dour and unemotional. In the movie, Tars Tarkas, the green man who eventually becomes Carter's friend, is your typical rough, laughing, boisterous barbarian. Carter has to encourage him to think outside the box of blind obedience to tradition and authority, but doesn't have to help him discover his capacity for emotion. Considering how movie and TV SF never seems to tire of humans teaching cold, aloof aliens how to feel, it seems odd that the filmmakers dumped this bit of the story (which wasn't such a cliché when Burroughs used it back in 1911.)
The movie also only has one swordfight in it, whereas in the novel, most battles are swordfights, and Carter is the greatest swordsman on two worlds. If you're a fan of the book or of swashbuckling action in general, you have to deplore that change, although to be fair, it does make sense. Since the movie Carter is a modern soldier, not an immortal warrior, it would be odd if it turned out that he just happened to fence like d'Artagnan.
Some bits of the book are simply tossed in in a way that's inconsistent, wrong, and annoying. When she first appears, Dejah Thoris is introduced the princess of Helium (her city-state), which is correct. Later, though, she is repeatedly identified as the princess of all Mars, which is both incorrect and confusing. It would make no sense for the green men to be her enemies if she were their princess, too. The word "jeddak" is used as though it means "warrior." Not according to Burroughs, it doesn't. It means "emperor."
But for me, the biggest disappointment was that Burroughs's Mars is an ancient, dying, alien world full of wonders, mysteries, and strangeness. In the movie, that rarely comes through, although there are a couple moments. I liked the thoats, the big flying ship, and the green men's odd-looking rifles. But by and large, when the story moves from the Middle East to Mars, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference from the scenery or the tone.
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Speaking of books with lots of swordplay, The Captive Flame, my new Forgotten Realms novel, is now available. I hope you'll check it out.
December 31, 2009
MY VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS
Once again, it's been months since my last blog entry, and once again, I am chagrinned. Sorry about that. In my defense, I can only say that between writing a new novel and teaching online, I've been busy.
But in the course of the past few weeks, I did get a chance to see Sherlock Holmes and to read Dracula the Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. So I thought I'd share my reactions to each. There will be spoilers, if you haven't seen the one or read the other, proceed at your own risk.
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I thought Sherlock Holmes was a tremendously entertaining film, exciting, funny, and generally compelling. I also thought it was true to the original Conan Doyle stories, and I suspect that those who have suggested otherwise haven't read them. The author tells us that Holmes is a master fighter, that he displays an almost pathological need for stimulation when it's been too long between cases, and that he can be a maddeningly self-centered, egotistical, slovenly, and eccentric.
It's a little harder to justify Watson as the expert combatant we see in the film, and off the top of my head, I don't remember a gambling habit. But the stories do make it clear that he's tough and resourceful, and that he craves the life of adventure Holmes offers but also feels that he ought to settle down and devote himself to his medical practice and marriage.
The portrayal of Irene Adler is the farthest off. Conan Doyle didn't present her as an accomplished brawler or an out-and-out criminal. But he only used her in one short story. She's not central to the canon, and I think it's defensible to change her if it serves the story. And here, it does.
The other major criticism I've seen is that the movie is all action; the great detective does precious little investigating and deducing. I think this is a bum rap, too. Holmes does plenty of thinking. It's just that his observations and conclusions are presented quickly, to maintain the pace of the film. You have to pay attention, or you won't get what he's saying.
To me, the part of the movie that felt most different from the original stories is the inclusion of advanced technology as the McGuffin. But it's not so advanced as to seen ridiculous, and hey, Conan Doyle wrote science fiction from time to time. So I didn't have a problem with that, either.
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To a degree, I enjoyed Dracula, the Un-Dead, too, but it disappointed me as well.
There have been countless versions of Dracula, and countless sequels. The difference is that this one was co-written by Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew. That led me to hope the book would be faithful to Stoker's original vision in a way other versions generally are not.
Long story short, it's not. As the authors acknowledge in the notes at the end, they took the path of least resistance and changed Stoker's rules of vampirism (which, admittedly, may not be entirely consistent) to the standard Hollywood rules the average person knows. Even more disappointingly, they make Dracula into a sexy, misunderstood good guy who squares off against a vampire who really is evil. Basically, it's the same premise as Angel, Twilight, and a lot of other modern vampire stuff.
I had a couple problems with this. One is that I came to the book wanting another dose of Stoker's original monster. Another is that if Dracula was really a good guy, then it follows that Van Helsing and the other vampire hunters were really schmucks, and that's how the new book portrays them. To me, that was just as disappointing. I wanted to go on admiring them and to care when one or another of them met his end, and within the context of this story, that was impossible.
My other major problem with the book is that characters' capabilities vary greatly according to the requirements of the plot at a particular moment. Seward, a debilitated drug addict, swings around on ropes and fight vampires with holy water and a bowie knife. The evil vampire flies back and forth between England and France. But later, when she comes to a washed-out bridge, she looks for another because flying across would take too much of her strength. It doesn't appear to make a lot of sense.
In fairness, the book has good points, too. It's fun to get the back-stories of Jonathan, Mina, and the others that the original didn't give us. It's also interesting to see what's become of the vampire hunters twenty-five years later, even if I would have preferred not to see their legend tarnished. And the book isn't afraid to get its Gothic on and present extravagant passions and lurid language without winking at the audience.
So check it out if you think you might like it. Just don't expect a resolution. The story is very definitely To Be Continued.
MY VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS
Once again, it's been months since my last blog entry, and once again, I am chagrinned. Sorry about that. In my defense, I can only say that between writing a new novel and teaching online, I've been busy.
But in the course of the past few weeks, I did get a chance to see Sherlock Holmes and to read Dracula the Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. So I thought I'd share my reactions to each. There will be spoilers, if you haven't seen the one or read the other, proceed at your own risk.
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I ...
