Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 41
May 23, 2018
I finally saw THOR: RAGNAROK (spoiler review)
Well, it took quite a while, but I finally reached the top of the library’s hold list for Thor: Ragnarok. So now I’ve finally seen it, out of sequence (after Black Panther) because it took so long. (I almost got it a week sooner from a friend who was going to loan me his Blu-Ray, but it turned out I couldn’t get my inherited Blu-Ray player to produce a picture without connectors that my other equipment can’t handle.) Fortunately, there’s nothing in either Ragnarok or Black Panther that requires them to be seen in order. As long as I saw them both before Avengers: Infinity War, I’m good.
So what did I think of Thor: Ragnarok? Not much, really. It’s a moderately amusing bit of fluff, but is that really enough for a movie about the Norse Armageddon? A lot of really big stuff happens in this movie, numerous major character deaths and permanent changes in the Asgardian status quo, and none of it has any emotional weight because the director is more interested in the comedy. None of the characters really seem to feel anything very deeply; they just look distractedly upset for a moment and then get back to being wry and quippy.
In the original Thor, the conflict between the brothers Thor and Loki was the emotional core of the film. That same family conflict, also including Odin and Frigga, was the most notable part of the second film as well. But here, we have Thor battling the sister he never knew he had — indeed, the original bearer of Mjolnir — and the fact of that relationship has effectively zero impact on the story, beyond the plot mechanics of explaining how she was able to hold and destroy Mjolnir. It just lies there and nothing is really done with it from a character standpoint. Hela is just one more of the MCU’s long list of one-dimensional villains who are more obstacles than characters. Meanwhile, the entire character arc of her henchman Skurge — based on what I gather was a really powerful and beloved storyline in Walt Simonson’s classic Thor run — is conveyed almost completely through Karl Urban repeatedly looking sullen and conflicted. The fact that most of the established Asgardian characters are killed off as an afterthought also weakens the impact of the conquest of Asgard, since there’s nobody there whose point of view we can identify with for much of Hela’s invasion. (I’m just glad that Jaimie Alexander’s commitment to Blindspot spared Lady Sif from the cavalier carnage. Maybe she can still show up on Agents of SHIELD again sometime.)
Then you’ve got the whole Planet Hulk adaptation crammed in and overshadowing the storyline that the movie’s actually named for. Again, as an insubstantial bit of amusement, it was fine. Certainly it deserves credit for going whole hog on the Jack Kirby design sense more than any prior MCU movie (with Stan Lee’s costume being the most Kirbyesque thing ever). But honestly, I’ve never been a fan of Kirby’s artwork, and I find his designs garish and silly. And again, there’s not much substance to the plotline. Thor’s arc with Loki is one that should be quite effective on paper, but it’s directed and played with so little weight and so much snark that the poignancy isn’t there. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie (who isn’t really called Valkyrie, but is just a Valkyrie whose given name is unrevealed) has a lot of inner angst, but it’s only passingly addressed, rushed through like most of the serious and important stuff in this movie. And Mark Ruffalo is surprisingly disappointing as both Hulk and Bruce Banner. It’s good to hear Hulk speaking more than two words per movie at last, but Ruffalo’s voice isn’t really cut out for it, even electronically deepened. And as Banner, he seemed to be distracted and phoning in his part, the charisma and subtle emotion he brought in his previous appearances not in evidence.
I’ve heard a lot of praise for this movie, and I just don’t get it. Sure, it has its funny bits, which is fine as far as it goes. But a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie should go farther. The MCU’s films and some of its TV shows have plenty of humor, even outright comedy, but they also have emotional depth and sincerity and a real sense of stakes and danger. This movie only seemed to care about laid-back snark and put little effort into the rest. None of the characters really seemed to be more than mildly annoyed or disappointed about any of the huge, intense, tragic, dramatic stuff that happened, so it was hard for me as a viewer to care much about it either. It was an amusing way to pass 2 hours and a bit, but it provided no substance that lasted beyond the moment. It’s really quite dissatisfying after the fact. This is the way Asgard ends: not with a bang, but with a shrug.
May 22, 2018
WILD CYBERS: Second stretch goal met! “Abductive Reasoning” is unlocked!
[image error]We did it! The Epic Science Fiction Adventures campaign has just surpassed its $1500 stretch goal, which means that all Kickstarter backers at $5 and above will get an electronic copy (DRM-free) of my short story “Abductive Reasoning” along with Among the Wild Cybers, Bud Sparhawk’s Shattered Dreams, and whatever other goodies they’ve pledged for. Another short story by Robert Waters, “Los Gatos,” had previously been unlocked.
Note that we’ve dialed back our goals a bit, since there’s only a shade over a week left in the campaign. Before, the interval between successive stretch goals was $500, but now it’s been dropped to $300. That means that if we can get the pledges up to $1800, backers at $5-up will receive a digital copy of Danielle Ackley-McPhail’s short story “Forest of a Thousand Lost Souls” in addition to “Los Gatos” and “Abductive Reasoning.” If we can get up to $2100 in the week remaining, the next bonus is a full novel, David Sherman’s Issue in Doubt. And there are four more short stories to unlock up to $3300.
Can we make it to any more stretch goals in the 8 days remaining? Remember, folks, the more you pledge, the higher the monetary advances Bud Sparhawk and I get for our books, and the more benefits you and all your fellow backers receive in return.
“Hubpoint of No Return” annotations now available
[image error]Sorry I’ve been late putting up the annotations for “Hubpoint of No Return.” I had them written some time ago (I try to make a habit of doing annotations at the same time I proofread the galley pages, since I sometimes notice things that need fixing in the process), but I couldn’t post them until I saw the finished issue and could get the right page numbers. Unfortunately, my author copies apparently got lost in the mail, and I didn’t get replacements until this afternoon.
Anyway, the annotations page (with full spoilers) is here:
“Hubpoint of No Return” Annotations
Looking through the contents page of the May/June Analog, I see I’ve got the only novelette-length story in the issue — the rest is a serial conclusion, a novella, and a bunch of short stories. That’s unusual. Anyway, looks like I’ve got a bunch of stories to read now.
May 19, 2018
Yes, I’m going to Shore Leave this year
My second piece of writing news today: I can now confirm that I will be attending Shore Leave in Hunt Valley, Maryland as usual this year. The SF/fantasy convention will be held from July 6-8, 2018 at its usual venue, which is under new ownership yet again and is now called Delta Hotels Baltimore Hunt Valley.
The plan is to debut Among the Wild Cybers at the convention, a process I’ll talk more about once I figure out just what it entails. This will be the first time I’ve debuted an original book at Shore Leave. I’m hoping there will be print copies of Hub Space available as well, but I’m not certain yet.
Oh, and there’ll be some actor guy named Shatner there too. I think I’ve seen him in one or two things…
There be WILD CYBERS here!
No, I’m not under attack by rogue robots — rather, my author copies of Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman have just arrived.
They’re thinner than I expected for a nearly 80,000-word book, but I guess that’s because of the trade-paperback format. But here they are, and it’s not much longer before the rest of you can get them too (Kickstarter backers first).
Here’s my brag shelf of all my original fiction to date, such as it is:
Minus Hub Space, which I haven’t yet obtained a print copy of. But hey, the shelf is finally starting to grow a bit, and there’s a good chance that it’ll be growing more before long. For now, though, Only Superhuman and Among the Wild Cybers contain my complete published works to date in my primary original universe (plus “No Dominion”). So it’s nice to see them side by side. (I put ATWC first both for height reasons — I don’t want it between two shorter mass-market paperbacks — and because I generally shelve anthologies/collections before novels, a habit I picked up when I worked at the university library.)
And we’re now ridiculously close to unlocking “Abductive Reasoning” for Kickstarter backers — one to three more pledges should do it:
Only 11 days left!
May 18, 2018
My good deed for the day (with help)
I was just out for a walk at the local park, processing some good news I received yesterday and the extent to which it will improve my current financial situation (markedly but not completely, and I can’t say anything more yet). On my way out of the park, I noticed something anomalous about a young, recently planted tree, maybe close to twice my height. It and several others had those cylindrical wire-mesh cages around the trunks, the sort of thing that I guess are there to keep the flimsy saplings from blowing over or being knocked over or whatever. But someone had apparently lifted the wire cage up around its branches, and it was stuck there. It was probably someone’s drunken prank, judging from the beer bottle lying by the base of the tree. After a moment’s thought, I decided I couldn’t leave the poor tree in that condition, so I tried to see if I could work the cage free of the branches and lower it back down without hurting any of the branches too much. It proved tricky, though, with too many places where it was hooked in. I noticed that there was a seam in the cage where one end was hooked to the other, and I realized that if I could undo the hooks, I could unwrap the cage and then re-wrap it around the base.
But the cage was just a bit too high on the tree for me to reach the top hook, and I’d need to start at the top for best results. So I was on the verge of giving up when I noticed a jogger, apparently a college student from the bookstore logo on his sweatshirt, and asked him to give me a hand. I explained the situation and suggested that we could work together to unhook the seam, but he was convinced it would be simpler just to lift the whole thing up and over. So we gave that a try (after he threw away the beer bottle), and it turned out we were underestimating the height of the tree, or overestimating our own. We’d just made matters worse, making the whole thing more top-heavy and more likely to topple the tree.
At this point, I remembered that I’d seen some loose chairs in another part of the park, evidently left there by some recent visitors. So I hurried over to get one while the jogger held the cage up. Once I got back, he stood on the chair (my balance isn’t great these days — I got dizzy just looking up while trying to free the cage) and eventually managed to lift and rotate the cage free of the branches, with a little gentle bending of the upper portion of the tree on my part. Then it was just a matter of unhooking the freed cage and wrapping it back around the trunk where it belonged. I thanked the jogger, we talked a bit about our respective past experiences with other people’s tree vandalism, and we went our separate ways.
So this was our good deed for the day: straightening up someone else’s mesh.
May 16, 2018
WILD CYBERS Kickstarter — two weeks left!
Time is running out, folks. There are now only two weeks left to pledge to the eSpec Books Epic Science Fiction Adventures Kickstarter for my Among the Wild Cybers story collection and Bud Sparhawk’s new novel Shattered Dreams. We’re now less than $120 short of the second stretch goal, which will unlock a DRM-free digital copy of my recent Analog short story “Abductive Reasoning” for all backers at the $5 level and above. Meanwhile, Bud Sparhawk has just provided two new special pledge levels: For a pledge of $50 or more, five lucky pledgers will receive print and digital copies of Shattered Dreams and a limited-edition Bud Sparhawk trading card, and for $70 or more, five pledgers will receive all of that plus a pair of uniform patches for military divisions within Bud’s fictional universe, I guess for cosplayers and the like.
And remember, there are still more bonus stories to be unlocked for every additional $500 pledged! Only two weeks to go!
May 14, 2018
Memory RNA after all?
Today I’m experiencing that common occupational hazard for the science fiction writer: Learning that a new scientific discovery has rendered something I wrote obsolete.
I’ll let Tamara Craig, the narrator of my 2010 story “No Dominion” from DayBreak Magazine, explain:
Nearly a century ago, an experiment with flatworms seemed to show that memory was stored in RNA and could be transferred from one organism to another. But the experiment had been an unrepeatable fluke — pardon the pun — and later research showed that memory worked in a completely different way, unfortunately for the science fiction writers who’d embraced memory RNA as a plot device.
(This passage is trimmed down a bit in the version soon to be reprinted in Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman, since that collection’s editor thought the references to SF writers were a bit too meta and distracting.)
What I wrote there was based on memory and was roughly correct. In the late 1950s and early ’60s (“No Dominion” is set in 2059), a researcher named James V. McConnell spent years experimenting with memory in planaria (flatworms), doing things like cutting them up and testing if their regenerated tails retained the memories of their original heads, and — most famously — grinding them up and feeding them to other flatworms. McConnell’s research did seem to show that some learned behavior was passed on by what he proposed to be a form of RNA storing memories created in the flatworm’s brain. It’s true that there was never enough reliable confirmation of his result to establish it as true, and the scientific establishment dismissed McConnell’s findings, although they did inspire a lot of science fiction about RNA memory drips or memory pills as a technique for quick-learning overnight what would normally take months or years. However, it seems that there were some experiments that did appear to replicate the results. There just wasn’t enough consistency to make it definitive.
Apparently, there’s been some renewed experimentation with McConnell’s theory in the past few years, showing promising but uncertain results. What I read about today was a new result, involving snails rather than flatworms:
http://www.sfn.org/Press-Room/News-Release-Archives/2018/Memory-Transferred-Between-Snails
Memories can be transferred between organisms by extracting ribonucleic acid (RNA) from a trained animal and injecting it into an untrained animal, as demonstrated in a study of sea snails published in eNeuro. The research provides new clues in the search for the physical basis of memory.
Long-term memory is thought to be housed within modified connections between brain cells. Recent evidence, however, suggests an alternative explanation: Memory storage may involve changes in gene expression induced by non-coding RNAs.
A more thorough article about the result can be found at the BBC:
‘Memory transplant’ achieved in snails
Now, this doesn’t mean the original memory RNA idea was altogether right. This experiment involved injecting the RNA into the blood of the snails rather than feeding them ground-up snails. And the result probably needs to be repeated more times and studied more fully before it can be definitive. But it does suggest that I was wrong to insist that memory “worked in a completely different way.” It’s possible that memories are stored, not in patterns in the synapses of nerve cells, but in RNA in their nuclei, which has an epigenetic effect on the neurons’ gene expression and therefore their behavior and structure.
Of course, all these results show is that very simple reactions to stimuli can be transferred. There’s no evidence that it would work for something as elaborate as the kind of declarative memory and knowledge that the passage in the story was discussing, or the kind of procedural memory and skills often transferred by memory RNA in fiction (e.g. foreign languages or fighting techniques). Perhaps those kinds of memory are partly synaptic, partly epigenetic. Maybe there’s something else involved. So Tamara’s lines in the story may not be entirely obsolete, just a little inaccurate (forgivable, since she’s a cop, not a scientist).
So I guess it could be worse. It was a minor part of the story anyway. And the actual research itself suggests some interesting possibilities. The articles say that learning more about memory creation and storage — and perhaps memory modification and transfer — could help treat conditions like Alzheimer’s and PTSD. If so, then it’s unfortunate that McConnell’s results weren’t taken more seriously half a century ago.
May 7, 2018
WILD CYBERS — First stretch goal unlocked!
The Epic Science Fiction Adventures Kickstarter for Among the Wild Cybers (and Bud Sparhawk’s Shattered Dreams) has achieved its first stretch goal of $1200. This means that everyone who pledges $5 or above from this point on will get, in addition to the basic rewards for their pledge, a DRM-free digital copy of Robert Waters’s short story “Los Gatos.”
The next stretch goal reward is a DRM-free digital copy of my short story “Abductive Reasoning” from the Sept/Oct 2017 Analog. Once we reach $1500 in pledges, that story will be unlocked for everyone who pledges $5 and up. This is a nice bonus because it’s my one remaining uncollected story to date, other than the new “Hubpoint of No Return” in the current Analog (and the plan is to collect that along with its two sequels once all three have come out). So if and when we reach that goal, Kickstarter backers will have a more comprehensive and up-to-date collection of my short fiction than Among the Wild Cybers alone had room to provide.
Every additional $500 in pledges beyond that will unlock another short story by one of several authors, including “Forest of a Thousand Lost Souls” by my editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail (at the $2000 level) and “Stone-Cold Whodunit” from my pal Keith R.A. DeCandido’s Super City Police Department series (at the $4500 level). There are still a few bonuses left to reveal beyond that, possibly including something more from me.
So let’s get those pledges up there, folks! Tell your friends! Share and tweet and other social media things! The more pledges we get, the more everyone (well, $5-up) gets in return. Only 23 days left!
May 6, 2018
Thank you so much!
I want to give my deepest thanks to all the readers who made donations after my plea on Tuesday. Thanks to your exceptional generosity, I’m now confident that I’ll be able to pay my rent for another month, and most of my other bills as well. I’m not entirely out of the woods yet — and it turns out that my “good reason to believe” my writing situation would soon be improving is a bit less of a sure thing than I thought, or at least a bit more distant. Still, your donations have given me time, and enough relative peace of mind, to do my own part and continue looking for work. I’m deeply grateful, and I intend to give you all a shout-out in the acknowledgments of my next book, unless you let me know you’d rather stay anonymous. There may even be some characters named after you in some future book. It’s the least I owe you guys for being there for me when I needed you.
In the meantime, my book sale remains ongoing; consult the previous post for the list of books and the payment info.
To the person in Japan who ordered the copy of Only Superhuman: I still need to receive the international postage cost before I can send the book. I e-mailed you with the amount on Thursday, so please get back to me soon.
Meanwhile, folks, please share the word about the Among the Wild Cybers Kickstarter with anyone you can think of who might be interested. The more pledges we get, the more goodies our backers get, and the more it helps me pay my bills for next month, if not this one. The Kickstarter will remain open until May 30.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/e-specbooks/epic-science-fiction-adventures?ref=card
