Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 35

“The Melody Lingers” in July!

It was last July that I announced selling my first fantasy story, “The Melody Lingers,” to Mike Resnick’s Galaxy’s Edge Magazine. It’s been so long that I was wondering what had happened to it, but Mike just informed me that it’s slated for the next issue, Galaxy’s Edge #39, dated July 2019. I think that means it may be out sometime in June, but I’m not sure.

“The Melody Lingers” is a short story about magic harnessed through music, using the distinct system of magic I developed for the world the story is set in, which I call Thayara. I came up with it back in the ’90s, but readers may note some broad similarities to the magic system from Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence.

Galaxy’s Edge is available in multiple electronic formats and in print from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and select stories from the current issue are available for free on its homepage at http://www.galaxysedge.com/, with ordering and subscription links for the full magazine further down on the page. I don’t yet know whether “The Melody Lingers” will be one of the free stories for the July issue — we’ll see.

FOOTPRINTS IN THE STARS is funded!

[image error]Yay! As of today, the eSpec Books Kickstarter has surpassed $1900 (indeed, it’s at $2041 as of this writing, a jump of about $250 since last night), meaning that the Footprints in the Stars anthology is now funded!

Once again, Footprints in the Stars is “A traditional science fiction collection with the theme of the discovery of evidence of other life in the universe and how those discoveries impact humanity. With stories by James Chambers, Robert Greenberger, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Aaron Rosenberg, Christopher L. Bennett, Dayton Ward, Russ Colchamiro, Vincent Collins, Bryan J. Glass, Gordon Linzner, Ian Randall Strock, and Danielle Ackley-McPhail.” As previously announced, my story will be “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” a new Troubleshooter adventure.

But the Kickstarter campaign isn’t over yet! A third book — Devil Dancers, a single-author military-SF collection by Robert E. Waters — will be funded when and if the campaign reaches $2800, and there are other bonuses and goodies available for Kickstarter backers, including an opportunity to obtain bonus copies of past eSpec books such as my collection Among the Wild Cybers. It’s all spelled out at the below link:

There are still 11 days left to go!

STAR TREK: THE CAPTAIN’S OATH has arrived!

When I headed out to do my laundry this morning, I found a package from Simon & Schuster sitting outside my apartment door. Inside were my author copies of Star Trek: The Original Series — The Captain’s Oath, 15 substantial trade paperbacks. Here are a couple of copies on my bookshelf, so you can see how they compare in size to the old mass-market paperbacks:

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Sorry it’s a bit blurry — it was a choice between that and one that was in focus but with Kirk’s face washed out by the flash.

And hey, there’s a bit of my old stand-up/poster for Ex Machina peeking in at the corner. My first and most recent covers side by side — an appropriate pairing in some ways, given that both books fill in overlooked periods in Kirk’s career, and have a couple of other elements in common as well.

This is my first full Star Trek novel in trade paperback; all my previous Trek TPB appearances have been in multi-author anthologies and collections. But it seems that mass-market paperbacks are a dying breed; their place in the market has been largely supplanted by e-books. But I like the larger size. It makes it feel more prestigious and hefty. The price is higher, but that means I get a bigger royalty for each copy sold, which hopefully improves my chances of earning out my advance on the novel (something that, to date, I’ve only done with Only Superhuman). And really, the odd thing is that MMPB prices managed to stay fixed at $7.99 for about a dozen years, defying inflation. If their price had continued to increase at the same rate it did during the previous dozen years, they’d now cost nearly as much as a currrent trade paperback anyway.

For the rest of you, it’s still a few more weeks before the book goes on sale (May 28 is the official release date), but you can pre-order it at:

Simon & Schuster
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
IndieBound

Note that there will also be an audiobook adaptation of the novel, read by Robert Petkoff. They consulted me about the pronunciation of alien and foreign-language names/terms in the book a couple of weeks ago, and they let me send them a recording of me pronouncing them aloud as well as a text file.

I’m currently reviewing my annotations for the novel, confirming that the page numbers match and making final tweaks; I should be able to post those not long after the book is released.

(In the meantime, please check out the Kickstarter for eSpec Books’ new anthologies including Footprints in the Stars, containing a new Troubleshooter story by me!)

My week of superhero dreams

I’ve posted parts of this on the TrekBBS and Facebook, but since it adds up to a larger whole, I thought I’d consolidate it here. I’ve had two dreams in the past week of the sort where I’m both a viewer of and a character in a TV show/movie at the same time, and in both of them, I was a member of a superhero team.

First, on Sunday night (or more like Monday morning, since I only remember the dreams that happen just before I wake up), I had a DC’s Legends of Tomorrow dream that was unusually semi-coherent as dreams go, and that I remember more of than usual. There’s a lot I don’t remember, but I was at some kind of meeting or rally (in a library, I believe) where the goddess who was the episode’s villain was controlling people’s minds, including the Legends, using a glowing blue wine. (This is in keeping with the turn toward fantasy and the supernatural that this time travel-centric show has taken over the past two seasons.) Since I don’t drink, I demurred and remained uncontrolled — and I think some half-awake rational part of my brain was puzzled that I was allowed to get away with that. I also wondered what happened to Zari Tomaz, since as a Muslim she’s presumably a non-drinker too. The episode/dream went on in some stream-of-consciousness way in the library stacks, with the Legends being freed somehow, or my dreaming brain just forgetting the mind-control aspect, but the mystery of where Zari was remained.

Then we left the library and went oudoors for the climax, a big confrontation with the deity (now male due to my forgetful unconscious mind) over the font of power which he was about to merge with or draw on or do something cataclysmic with. And when we rushed there to try to stop the god, we found that Zari was there ahead of us, singlehandedly defeating the god because she’d been investigating the legal records and had found that the god had gained his connection to the font of his power through a murder centuries ago, and revealing that fact aloud somehow nullified the god’s power and bound him, either because that was how the font of power worked or because the god was subject to the human legal system within my dream logic. So while the other Legends and I were flailing around trying to fight evil the superheroic way and wondering where the hell Zari was, she’d been methodically doing the research so she could solve the whole thing far more easily. Also, in my dream, Zari was a lawyer. Who knew?



The second dream was the night after I saw Avengers: Endgame, so two nights later, and it was a dream about Thanos (no spoilers, because it’s a dream, not the actual movie). In the dream, as in the movie, it was after he’d won the previous battle, but his goal in this version had apparently been merely to conquer Earth. So he was the ruler of Earth… and he was living in the attic of what, in the dream, was my house. Or at least a house I shared with some dream version of the Avengers. The world, my house — in a dream, the difference doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s where I keep all my stuff.

So anyway, there was a point where Thanos, Ruler of All, came down from the attic to sit on our couch and watch TV. (Right next to where I was sitting. The dude takes up a lot of couch space, folks.) But I and my fellow Avengers/roommates/whoever weren’t just taking this occupation of our living room and/or planet lying down. (Most of them were standing or sitting in armchairs, since there was no room left on the couch. Personal space, Thanos!) No, we were planning to show him some book in the hopes that it would convince him that we didn’t need his rule anymore and he could go home. Because of course, even in this alternate dream narrative, he still thought he was a benevolent tyrant, and we just needed to prove to him, using the book’s contents, that whatever goal he’d conquered us to bring about for our own good had been fulfilled already, so we didn’t need him anymore and he could just fly off back to his home planet in his helicopter. (No, the Thanos copter wasn’t actually in the dream, alas. I’m interpolating. But it would’ve fit right in.)
I don’t recall whether the book in question was fact or fiction. We may have been trying to con him into leaving in much the same way Reed Richards conned the Skrulls in FANTASTIC FOUR #2 by showing them pages from Marvel’s monster comics to convince them that Earth was too dangerous to conquer. But we didn’t get very far before the dream ended. So it didn’t have the satisfaction of being a complete (if barely coherent) story like the Legends dream was — more just a vignette (or a comedy sketch, though in the dream we took it all seriously).

Who knows? If the dream had continued, maybe Black Widow would’ve turned up some obscure legal precedent requiring Thanos to cede his claim to the planet. But then, as far as I recall, Black Widow was not in the dream. Alas, indeed.

Spoilery thoughts on AVENGERS: ENDGAME, with spoilers (Spoilers!)

I made sure recently to see Captain Marvel before Avengers: Endgame came out, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see Endgame right away, since it looked like the theaters would be jam-packed in the first week or two. I didn’t want to go to the theater and find the film sold out. My Facebook friends told me that the major multiplexes were showing it on a bunch of different screens at once, so it should be possible to get a seat, but looking at the seat reservation pages online, it looked like I’d have to settle for something on the edge or too close to the screen (I generally prefer the very back row in the smallish theaters that are common today). And there was an extra fee for ordering online, and I’ve never done that and didn’t want to go through whatever registration or rigmarole would be needed to do that. So I was undecided. But yesterday it looked like the theater I usually go to had added an extra showing for Tuesday morning (discount day, when I’d prefer to go), and since it was a late addition, it had more open seats than the ones around it. So on Tuesday morning I checked and saw it still had plenty of open seats, so I decided “What the heck” and drove over to the theater. I was able to get just about the exact seat I wanted, or at least the one next to it, but the seats around it were reserved already, and I ended up with a somewhat talkative couple next to me, which got distracting at times. And nobody but me seems to listen to the announcement about turning off their phones anymore, though the people around me did seem to stop texting once they got drawn into the movie.

So the spoilers begin below, and I’ve inserted a “Read more” cut for the front page of the blog, but here’s some extra spoiler space for those of you coming to it through Goodreads or Facebook or wherever:

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Final warning:

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Well, where do I begin? Well, I complained last time that there was too much plot to the detriment of character development, but Endgame avoided that since it had half as many main characters and nearly all of them knew each other already so they didn’t have to waste time on introductions. And basically the two films split the character focus, with the characters who were downplayed in part 1 getting the emphasis in part 2 and vice-versa, with some exceptions. As I predicted, the film was used to wrap up the arcs of the main MCU characters to date and pass the torch to the new generation. Which had the unfortunate effect of marginalizing most of the thrilling new characters we’ve become hyped for, so it felt like kind of an odd step backward while the MCU is moving forward. But it did provide an effective coda for the MCU to date so the new guard can really take the lead going forward.

It would’ve been nice to see more exploration of the impact of the Snap on the world beyond the Avengers. We only got glimpses. That’s the sort of thing I’d love to see Agents of SHIELD tackle, but it’s not clear when its upcoming final season will take place. Maybe some of the new shows that the Marvel Studios movie division is developing for the Disney+ streaming service will cover that, although the announced ones might not be in the right time frame. I guess the Netflix Marvel shows were cancelled in time to avoid the issue, but I wonder what Cloak and Dagger or Runaways will do going forward. But I’m getting off the track.

So… Five years pass. Tony finally gets a happy, quiet life with a family, which is an unexpected turn, but it kinda makes sense. Ever since 2008, he’s been obsessed with fixing the world’s problems, and he failed at it big time and finally gave up, which left him free to focus on just making his family work. Plus his near brush with death may have caused him to reassess his priorities. As for Cap, he stopped fighting but still dedicated himself to helping people in a different way, just as you’d expect. Thor had a rather poignant story despite the humorous aspects; he was devastated with guilt at his error in the final battle with Thanos, his one huge miscalculation that let Thanos win and that Thanos even taunted him for making. He was broken and ashamed, and his arc through the movie was driven by that guilt and his yearning for penance or atonement. That was pretty effective. As for Black Widow, it made sense that Natasha would cling to the Avengers as the one thing that gave her life a positive purpose, and thus would lead what was left of them. Rhodey stayed in the fight because that’s what old soldiers do, and because Tony didn’t.

As for Bruce, unifying with the Hulk and becoming the “Professor” incarnation was an interesting twist, and not an unreasonable resolution for the character’s core conflict, but it felt like there was something missing. In Part 1, the Hulk and Banner were at odds, with the Hulk refusing to come out and fight, and the reason for that was never explained (although apparently the filmmakers’ intent was that the Hulk was sick of being Banner’s lackey and only being called out to fight). And now they’re reconciled into one being, and the storyline just jumps over all the work they did to reach that point, which is unsatisfying. Also, it’s odd that the Hulk-sized Professor speaks with Bruce’s voice; he’s speaking with the Hulk’s anatomy, after all, and thus his voice should have the Hulk’s deeper timbre even if the personality behind it is Bruce.

The use of Carol Danvers in this film is also quite unsatisfying, after all the hype and buildup and so soon after seeing her star in her own film. She basically has the Superman problem: She’s so powerful that she has to be marginalized in a team story to justify the other heroes taking the lead. It doesn’t help that her part in this film was shot first so that the filmmakers didn’t even necessarily know her backstory, so that she’s more a plot device here than a character. It’s also awkward that the film just assumes we’ve all seen Captain Marvel and its mid-credits scene, giving Carol no introduction whatsoever within Endgame itself. That’s a narrative shortcut that was presumably dictated by how jampacked the film was with other storylines, but it’s still a serious structural flaw. It’s a pretty basic rule of storytelling never to assume your audience’s familiarity with earlier stories, always to provide some exposition about whatever’s relevant to the current story. Within the context of this film, even of this duology, Carol just shows up with zero explanation, a deus ex machina with magical powers, used to solve a couple of otherwise insoluble problems and otherwise marginalized. It’s a pretty clumsy way to handle any character in any story, but particularly one who’s been hyped as such a core player moving forward.

On the plus side, I gotta say, I love it that this time-travel movie finally comes out and says that the way almost every other time-travel movie does it is dumb and wrong. I’ve been saying that for ages. I love it that they actually consulted with physicists and went with a model of time travel that makes scientific and logical sense, and that serves the needs of their narrative as well. (Star Trek 2009 did the same thing, only to be trashed by fans who thought its scientifically valid time-travel model was “wrong” because they’ve been conditioned to believe the fanciful version used before.) Bruce/Professor Hulk did a terrible job of explaining the reason all those movies are wrong, but he’s right. Quantum physics says that if you travel to the past, you entangle that past with the future you came from and thereby guarantee that that’s the future you’ll create — or else you’ll follow two or more parallel paths, one of which is the original unaltered timeline. So either way, the movie is absolutely right that changing the past will not alter or erase your original timeline, but will only create alternative branches. Tony even tosses out some real physics terminology about temporal theory and it pretty much makes sense! Yay, science!

It seemed that they sort of broke it at the end, though, when they established that Steve went back to live out his life in the past with Peggy. Which is a great, beautiful ending for their story arc (an arc that’s been almost the exclusive responsibility of screenwriters Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, who wrote all three Captain America movies and created the Agent Carter TV series as well as writing this duology), but I wondered, if none of their time travels could alter the established past but would just create new parallel histories alongside it, then how was Old Man Steve extant in this timeline instead of a separate branch? But apparently the intent is that he lived out that life in a separate time branch and just came back to this one to tie up loose ends. Here’s a chart plotting the time travels in the film. It’s nice to know it’s consistent after all, but it was left a little unclear in the film itself.

As for the rest, the immutable-past, branching-timelines model gives them the freedom to play merry hell with past events, but I do wonder about the logic of the plot — “We want to minimize our impact on history and remove the Stones inconspicuously, so let’s make a plan that takes us right back to the crucial moments that have the maximum potential for interacting with our past selves and screwing things up.” I mean, they could’ve taken the Tesseract from SHIELD’s labs at any time between 1989 and 2012. Although the script did deal with that by limiting the number of trips they could make so that they had a reason to focus on the time when three Stones were in New York City at the same time, during the Battle of New York. But the Orb/Power Stone was in the temple on Morag for thousands of years. So why did they have to go back to the exact time that Quill stole it and Thanos was looking for it? And why didn’t Nebula know how her own cybernetics worked so that she could’ve anticipated the network link to her past self? That’s the one time jump that did the most damage, and it seemed like it was the one that was most easily avoidable.

I also have a big problem with the Vormir sequence with Black Widow and Hawkeye. So… you can only claim the Soul Stone if you lose someone you love? Dude! Clint lost his whole damn family! Condition met! Although if the rule is that you have to destroy someone you love, then surely suicide wouldn’t cut it (unless you’re a narcissist). So Nat and Clint trying to sacrifice themselves for each other should not have met the conditions for getting the Stone. To be consistent with the previous film, it would only count if one of them killed the other, not themselves. And as they’re both assassins, they’re the only two O.G. Avengers who should have been capable of making that hard choice. (Well, maybe a warrior like Thor could have, if he hadn’t already been so guilty about the uncounted lives he failed to save.) And I would’ve preferred it if Clint had been the sacrifice; honestly, I’ve never found Jeremy Renner an appealing performer. But I guess Natasha’s been the bigger part of this series, and the goal here was to bring the top leads’ story arcs to a decisive conclusion. (Although oh hey that pretty much guarantees the Black Widow solo movie they’re developing is a prequel. Which kinda limits the sequel possibilities. Phooey.)

Let’s see, what else… I liked the elevator scene where Steve got the Scepter — a nice echo of the iconic elevator scene in The Winter Soldier, and a cheeky nod to the controversial “Hydra Cap” storyline in the comics. Oh, and I loved it when James D’Arcy’s Edwin Jarvis from Agent Carter showed up as Howard Stark’s driver in the ’70s. At last, a character introduced in the TV side of the MCU appears in a movie! It no doubt helps that he’s a character from the show that the movie’s writers produced, but since he’s a character who’s only been seen in the ’40s, it’s easier to use him without any continuity hassles (although he didn’t really look 30 years older). And other TV characters like Coulson’s SHIELD team or the Defenders would’ve needed introductions for the benefit of the movie-only audience, something there wasn’t time for. Jarvis could just be taken by those viewers as a reference to Tony’s AI J.A.R.V.I.S., an “Ohh, so that’s where he got the name!” moment.

Speaking of brief cameos, it was pretty easy to tell that Natalie Portman was not an actual participant in the filming process, that the one clear shot of her was deleted footage from an earlier movie shoot digitally incorporated into this one. Although I gather she did provide a tiny bit of voiceover work. And really, it’s surprising how many other big-name actors got star billing in the end credits just for showing up and standing there wordlessly in one or two shots, like Marisa Tomei, Angela Bassett, William Hurt, etc. There were a couple of scenes here and there where it looked like some of the actors were inserted digitally, like the big funeral at the end. Some of them probably just showed up and stood on a greenscreen stage or in a digital scanner for an hour or so, went home, and pocketed an enormous paycheck for it.

Even with all these big, legendary actors, though, I think a case can be made that Karen Gillan stole large portions of this movie with a superb, complex performance as two versions of Nebula, who unexepctedly emerged as one of the most important characters in the narrative. I’ve always been impressed by Gillan’s acting since her Doctor Who days, and she was a standout here.

So there was a big fight in the third act, which I don’t have much to say about since it was just a big fight and those rarely do much for me, but it had some nice character moments. “On your left” was probably my favorite. Oh yeah, and Cap being worthy to lift Mjolnir, and Thor laughing and saying “I knew it!” Of course he’s worthy!

Remember the talkative couple next to me? The guy couldn’t figure out how Thanos could lift Stormbreaker (even though it didn’t have Odin’s enchantment on it, so anyone strong enough could lift it — heck, its handle is literally made of Groot’s arm), and when Cap picked up Mjolnir, the guy thought it meant Cap was really a disguised Loki, which… is totally not how it works. What was he thinking, that it was keyed to Asgardian genes rather than personal worthiness? Anyway, his confused chatter somewhat distracted me from Cap finally getting to say “Avengers Assemble!” on camera. This is why I rarely go to movies in the first week.

Oh, and when everybody was trying to get through the horde of bad guys to get the glove with the Infinity Stones to the time portal… you could say they were running the Infinity Gauntlet Gauntlet. I wonder if devising the sequence that way was some sort of subtle pun on the filmmakers’ parts.

And yeah, the climactic moment was pretty impressive. I knew that the reason Dr. Strange gave up the Time Stone in exchange for Thanos sparing Tony in Infinity War had to mean that the only timeline Strange saw where they won was one where Tony was crucial to the victory. And that is how it turned out. And Tony did it by calling back the famous closing line of the very first MCU movie, which is a fitting way to bring his story to its end.

As for Cap, I love it that Steve chose Sam to be the new Captain America rather than Bucky. I always wanted it to go that way, both because of what it symbolizes in this day and age for the embodiment of American values to be a person of color, and because Anthony Mackie is about a thousand times more charismatic an actor than Sebastian Stan. I’m a bit puzzled that they’re developing a Disney+ series called Falcon & Winter Soldier, if Sam is Cap now instead of Falcon. (Although maybe the announced title was a misdirect to avoid spoilers?)

I also wonder how the heck everyone in the upcoming Spider-Man: Far from Home is still in high school 5 years later. Did the entire class get dusted? Or is it a prequel?

Anyway, it does seem like the torch has been pretty decisively passed to the new guard. Iron Man and Widow are gone, Cap is retired due to age and/or returned to his alternate timeline, and Professor Hulk has apparently lost the use of his right arm. Thor is with the Guardians now, which means he could stick around, but in a different capacity. Hawkeye will presumably stay retired, at least until his Disney+ spinoff series. Rhodey and Pepper could potentially still be around, but I don’t really expect them to play a major role (although it’d be cool to see them as mentors in an Ironheart movie). Fury’s still around, and he’s featured in Far from Home, but after that, who knows? I guess the focus has now shifted to the likes of Spider-Man, Ant-Man & Wasp, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel, as well as the Guardians off doing their own thing, plus the Eternals, Shang-Chi, and whatever else gets added next, possibly including the Fantastic Four and the X-Men in some form. I’m actually pretty surprised at how sharp a break they’ve made, bringing so many lead characters’ stories to decisive ends. And they’re being pretty coy about what lies ahead.

In any case, what they’ve done over the past 11 years is pretty extraordinary. 22 movies sharing a single reality, averaging 2 per year, building a vast unified narrative among them with relatively few inconsistencies as long-running movie series go, spinning off 11 TV series (to date) set in the same reality and maintaining a similar consistency among themselves (although the movies have almost completely ignored them, and I think we’d all prefer to ignore Inhumans). The Marvel Cinematic Universe has largely transformed the feature industry, bringing a comics-like level of inter-series continuity and a TV-like serial writing process to a feature film franchise, and inspiring many, mostly failed attempts to copy it by other studios. And it’s brought unprecedented prestige to comic-book storytelling and invited an unprecedented number of top-grade, legendary actors, up to the caliber of Robert Redford, Anthony Hopkins, Tilda Swinton, and more. So whatever they decide to do next, it’s likely to be very interesting.

Almost there (book sale)

Sorry, I haven’t quite finished shipping out books yet, since I came down with a bug of some sort over the past couple of days. But I felt somewhat better today, and I now finally have all the remaining books packed up and addressed, ready to be driven to the post office tomorrow. I feel bad about it taking so long for me to fill the orders, but we’re almost there at last.

To the person who ordered one of everything, you’ll be getting the Trek books and the original books in separate packages, since I couldn’t find a box the right size to fit all of them. So don’t worry if you don’t get them all at once.

First Kickstarter goal met — FOOTPRINTS IN THE STARS still needs funding!

As of 11 AM on April 23, the first anthology in the eSpec Books Kickstarter, Defending the Future: In Harm’s Way, is now funded.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/e-specbooks/defending-the-future-in-harms-way?ref=card

But we still have nearly $1100 to go in order to fund Footprints in the Stars, the anthology containing my Troubleshooter story “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of.” Luckily, there are still 26 days to go. It only took 4 days to get to 100% — let’s see how long it takes to get to 238%.

Books starting to ship!

I’m pleased to report that, now that I have my bills paid up and my life starting to settle down, I’ve finally begun mailing out the books that you guys bought from me last month. Sorry it took so long, but I’m finally catching up. Today I sent out more than half the orders; what remains are my overseas orders and the order for the guy who bought one of everything. Those will take a bit more work to get done, but hopefully I’ll get those out within the next day or two.

The Kickstarter for my next anthology is open!

We’re at it again, folks! eSpec Books has just opened a new Kickstarter for three anthologies, including Footprints in the Stars, which features my new Troubleshooter story “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of.”

The first anthology being fundraised for is In Harm’s Way, Volume 8 of editor Mike McPhail’s military-SF anthology series Defending the Future, which has a focus on rescue and recovery missions (an idea I think is pretty cool), and contains stories by Brenda Cooper, Bud Sparhawk, David Sherman, Edward J. McFadden, Robert E. Waters, Jeff Young, James Chambers, Lisanne Norman, Robert Greenberger, Aaron Rosenberg, Christopher M. Hiles, Eric Hardenbrook, and Danielle Ackley-McPhail.

[image error]Once that book is funded, the other two anthologies will be funded as stretch goals:

Footprints in the Stars: “A traditional science fiction collection with the theme of the discovery of evidence of other life in the universe and how those discoveries impact humanity. With stories by James Chambers, Robert Greenberger, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Aaron Rosenberg, Christopher L. Bennett, Dayton Ward, Russ Colchamiro, Vincent Collins, Bryan J. Glass, Gordon Linzner, Ian Randall Strock, and Danielle Ackley-McPhail.”

Devil Dancers is a single-author military-SF collection by Robert E. Waters, containing reprinted and original stories in the titular universe.

The fundraising goal for In Harm’s Way is $800. Once we reach $1900, then Footprints in the Stars will be funded, and Devil Dancers will be funded at $2800. As with last time, there are also bonus stories and other rewards for people who pledge certain amounts, which will all be spelled out at the Kickstarter page — just click on the widget up above. The Kickstarter will remain open until May 19, 2019.

I’m told that Footprints in the Stars is scheduled to make its debut at this year’s Shore Leave Convention in Baltimore from July 12-14, which I expect to be attending as usual. The eSpec folks are going to be there as well, and we’re going to have a panel and stuff.

So everybody start Kickstarting! Or… whatever.

Finally, my thoughts on CAPTAIN MARVEL (spoilers)

Since my advance check finally came last week, I finally got to see Captain Marvel yesterday (I still waited for the Tuesday discount). I wonder if it was just coincidence that the multiplex had Captain Marvel and Shazam! (based on the Fawcett/DC character I grew up knowing as Captain Marvel) running in adjacent theaters. I wonder if anyone’s gotten confused and asked for the wrong movie.

Anyway, Captain Marvel is a pretty good movie. I like its structure — the way it introduces us to the character of “Vers” in the present after she’s lost her memory and then gradually has her discover her origins (a nice break from the usual origin-story format), and the way it integrates the flashbacks into her real-time POV as dreams or memory-probe findings, which is deft and economical. And it’s effective in the way it handles the Kree and the Skrulls, setting us up to believe we know who the good guys and bad guys are, only to turn it around in a surprising way. I honestly didn’t see that twist coming. Which is partly because I’m used to seeing Jude Law in more or less heroic roles and know Ben Mendelsohn mainly as Rogue One‘s villain, so the casting helped to fool me. Also because the Skrulls are usually villains in the comics, although the loss of their homeworld is a plot point there too. (Come to think of it, if the MCU Skrulls have been reduced to scattered refugees in the 1990s, that explains why they’re not a significant presence in the 21st-century MCU.)

It was also a surprise, and a pretty nice touch, to tie the origin of Carol’s powers into the Tesseract, and along the way to explain how it ended up in SHIELD’s possession (although that’s a bit of a retcon from what we’d previously been shown about Howard Stark recovering it from the ocean floor; apparently the new version, according to the MCU Wiki, is that Stark helped found Lawson’s Project PEGASUS, although I don’t recall that being stated outright in the movie). They also connected their version to the original comics origin (of Carol getting her powers from Mar-Vell, the original Marvel character to use the Captain Marvel name) in an unexpected way, assigning the name Mar-Vell to Annette Bening’s scientist character.

Speaking of the project, it was weird to have the alien characters talking about a “lightspeed engine” created by a backward civilization like humans as some revolutionary breakthrough when they were already routinely far surpassing the speed of light by making hyperspace jumps. I mean, sure, we learned that the search for the lightspeed engine was just a cover for the (distinct) things that the Skrulls and the Kree were respectively searching for, but it’s implausible that it would even work as a cover story, because it doesn’t sound like something new or important to an already FTL-capable civilization.

As for the Earthbound stuff, it was interesting to get a look at a younger, more relaxed Nick Fury. It was more than just digital de-aging; he was a lot more whimsical and playful back then, which was an interesting choice, though kind of revisionist (but then, the character’s been revisionist since the moment Samuel L. Jackson was cast in the role). It was good to see Phil Coulson too, but he didn’t really serve that much role in the story beyond the indulgence of having him there. Well, I guess his actions do help lay the groundwork for why Fury placed so much trust in him later on, but aside from that one moment in the stairwell, he didn’t really have that much to do that any generic exposition-spouting subordinate couldn’t have done.

I’m not sure the friendship between Carol and Maria Rambeau came through as strongly as it was meant to, since most of it was just glimpsed in flashbacks, and most of the present-day (well, 1990s present) Maria’s role in the film was dominated by exposition and action. But young Monica and her relationship with Carol rather stole the show, which is good because Monica’s presumably the one we’ll see again in the sequel, although she’ll no doubt be played by a different actress.

As far as actors go, I’d say the standout here was Ben Mendelsohn, who did a great job making Talos a complex and engaging character and working equally well when we thought he was the villain and when he turned out to be the nice guy in need of help. Jackson and Gregg did their usual good jobs with what they had to work with. Law was effective too, although Lee Pace was just as wasted as Ronan here as he was in Guardians of the Galaxy, and Djimon Hounsou only had a little more to do here than there. Gemma Chan was also sadly underutilized.

As for Brie Larson herself, she was reasonably effective, but I’m afraid I find her a little bland. Carol/Captain Marvel in the comics has been a breakout character, impressive in her strength of character, charisma, and heroism as well as her physical power. I haven’t read many comics she’s been in, but I’ve read a fair amount of Ms. Marvel and seen her through Kamala Khan’s admiring eyes, and I remember Jennifer Hale’s effectively strong performance as Carol in the animated The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Animation and gaming fans know that Hale is a pretty hard act to follow, and I’m afraid I find Larson a little underwhelming in comparison. She’s not bad in any way, but her performance just doesn’t really grab me the way Scarlett Johansson, Hayley Atwell, Gal Gadot, and others have grabbed me. (Like just a couple of nights ago, I was watching Caity Lotz in a guest appearance on Arrow as Sara Lance/White Canary, and there was a moment where just her facial expression and a single line reading made me think “Damn, she’s a compelling performer.” I’ve never had such a moment with Brie Larson in anything I’ve seen her in.)

I also feel the film was maybe a bit too humorous and light in the later portions. As a rule, I like most things that involve cats, but the business with Goose in the climactic portions of the film got a little too silly for me, and the explanation for how Fury lost his eye was a bit dumb.

Anyway, now I’m inevitably speculating about what role Carol will play in Avengers: Endgame. Since her powers come from the Tesseract/Space Stone, that kind of makes her a walking Infinity Stone, which is probably why she could be the key to beating Thanos. Too bad Fury never actually told the Avengers who it was they were named after and what she could do — it might’ve saved some trouble if they’d known to call her in sooner. (And if Goose had been there, he probably could’ve just swallowed the Infinity Gauntlet right off of Thanos’s arm.)

Oh, I almost forgot — the opening tribute to Stan Lee. That was beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes. “Thank you, Stan.”