Carrie Vaughn's Blog, page 36

Aquaman

Okay, where to start. Here, we’ll start here:

[Setting:  immediately after the movie, still in the theater.]

Friend:  “What were those seahorse things but with fins like for walking?”

Me: “Those were sea dragons.”

Friend:  “That’s not a real thing.”

Me:  “They totally are.” [Pulls up picture of a Leafy Sea Dragon on my phone.]

Friend:  “Holy shit they’re real!”

Me:  “THEY’RE REAL IT’S ALL REAL ALL OF IT IS REAL IT’S TOTALLY REAL.” [Jumping around, waving arms wildly.]

Friend:  “And…now we’re seeing what Carrie was like when she was nine.”

***

So that was basically me through the entire movie. I am Atlantean now. Shut up I am. I want to ride hammerhead sharks and wear a dress made out of jellyfish. I’m a little bit in love with Patrick Wilson’s villain King Orm because SEA ELF HE IS A SEA ELF. It took me eight years to figure out what to do with my hair while scuba diving so it wouldn’t get tangled up in my mask and stuff but I totally did it so I AM READY. (I have to pull it all back in a pony tail and then braid the pony tail and it actually looks pretty cool and I believe this style will make me fit right in in Atlantis. I do feel the movie underestimated how difficult managing long hair underwater really is.)

Is the movie any good?  Honestly, I don’t know. But I had so much gonzo cheesetastic ridiculous fun with the whole thing I don’t even care. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER:  Aquaman rides an Elder God into the final battle. They are friends now because he is the first person to just talk to it in thousands of years. THIS IS SO AWESOME I CANNOT CONTAIN THE AWESOMENESS OF IT. Also, the Elder God, Karathen, is voiced by Julie Andrews. I KNOW RIGHT?!

DC finally figured out that sometimes making a good superhero movie means embracing the crazy and throwing all that glorious weirdness against the wall to see what happens. Sometimes, it all sticks.

***

So another thing:  structurally, this isn’t a superhero movie. It’s urban fantasy.  Superhero stories are about a person who gets amazing powers and what they do with those powers and what those powers mean and with great power comes great responsibility and so on and so forth.  Aquaman isn’t about that. It’s about Arthur Curry, who is caught between two worlds, who was raised in the mundane world but has this connection to a supernatural/otherworldly world that calls him to adventure and his unique perspective on both allows him to succeed where someone solely from either world would fail.

It’s urban fantasy, and that’s great.

 

Christmas Dragons!

Another thing that happened while I was traveling was this story about Christmas dragon decorations in Louisiana went totally viral. You probably saw it.

I would just like to brag that the Diana Rowland responsible for the dragons and interviewed in the above article is in fact the SF&F author and my friend Diana, and also my collaborator on the story “Takes All Kinds,” that appears in Urban Allies, edited by Joseph Nassise.

That’s Diana, fighting the good fight for all of us geeky types.

 

Christmastime is here…

I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks, and arrived home bemused to realize that Christmas is, like, here. Fortunately, I appear to be carrying some of that vacation calm with me. Hey, if it hasn’t been done by now, it’s not going to be. And that’s okay.

I read three books, gave up on a fourth halfway through, plotted two short stories, listed a dozen lifers on my bird list, my favorite of which is probably the ruby-topaz hummingbird. (Seriously, is that not one of the most beautiful birds you’ve ever seen?) Logged four dives. Bonaire is now one of my favorite diving locations. The biodiversity was incredible on all the ABC islands I visited.

And now, it’s time to pack up and head to the family and do the holiday thing.

A couple of things went live while I was gone:

The Island of Beasts, my Regency-era story about exiled werewolves, is up on Nightmare.

My reviews of First Man and The House with a Clock in Its Walls are up on Lightspeed.

Speaking of which I am SO BEHIND on movie watching right now. Hoping to get to Aquaman soon. Maybe. I hope.

Happy Holidays, all.

 

Santa Ray

I decorated the tree and found one of my favorite ornaments.

It’s a Santa Ray.

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2018 in review – new fiction published

Here is it, my year in review — all the new fiction I published.

Novels:

The Wild Dead, the sequel to my Philip K. Dick Award-Winning Bannerless, July 2018.

Novelettes:

“A Broken Thread in a Dark Room,” Wild Cards: One-Eyed Jacks (reprint edition), Tor Books, August 2018

“Where Would You Be Now,” Tor.com, Feb 2018

“Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana,” Lightspeed Magazine, Sept 2018

“The Huntsman and the Beast,” Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2018

Short Stories:

“Closer to the Sky,” Mechanical Animals, ed. Selena Chambers and Jason Heller, Nov 2018

“The Island of Beasts,” Nightmare Magazine, Dec. 2018

 

For some reason I felt like I hadn’t done that much this year. I think because a lot came out just in the last couple months. Another thing I notice — more novelettes than short stories. So, more “longer” short fiction than usual.  I’m not sure this is even really a trend, since the fiction that came out this year was written over the last several. (“The Secret of Ahomana” and “Closer to the Sky” were written several years ago, for example, and the editors held on to them for various reasons. And then “The Island of Beasts” was maybe six or so months between writing and publication.) When some of it finally gets published is often chance and happenstance.

All that said, my fiction production still seems really consistent. I tell people I can write a novel and a half and six short stories in a year. And here ya go.

 

holiday reading

After my massive, massive month-long research binge, I’ve been saving up fun reading for the holidays. Some of my favorite new series have new installments.

I’m very excited to curl up and just READ.  Oh, and I’ll probably add Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood to the list to clear the palate after that movie.

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Babylon 5 rewatch again

Comet TV is broadcasting Babylon 5 and I’ve been dipping into it now and then because it’s SO GOOD and I just can’t look away. So this technically isn’t a real rewatch, but a sort-of rewatch.  And it’s another show where I just like hanging out with these people. Sheridan is so relentlessly cheerful, in contrast to nearly every other sci fi captain on television, and I’m appreciating that more and more.

This time around, I’m noticing the show’s spirituality and metaphysics, which I guess I’ve always noticed before but for some reason it’s standing out to me this time.  On the one hand it’s an easy way to plot (a. There is a prophecy. b. Is the prophecy fulfilled and how? c. Plot!)  But I think the show does enough with the subject in other ways — lots of individual spiritual journeys (Ivanova mourning her father, Stephen’s Walkabout), the presence of actual religious figures, showing religion incorporated into everyday life for both humans and aliens. And this overall idea that religion and spirituality should be something that helps people deal with life, and if it doesn’t — if it becomes dogmatic and prescriptive — then it fails.

And now I’m suddenly comparing/contrasting with The Last Kingdom. One of the things I love about that show is its depiction of early medieval Christianity and how completely wrapped up in politics it was, and then tangled up with Danish paganism, with Uhtred smack in the middle of everything.

Meaty stuff.

 

 

BOOM

I think I finished it. At least this draft.

The longest thing I have ever written is no longer the longest thing I have ever written because I cut 25k words out of it.

I think I’m ready to send this thing out to my beta reader.

I think.

Maybe I should go tweak things one more time. . .

 

Robin Hood (2018)

I love Robin Hood stories and I always will, and I don’t mind that it gets remade, like, all the time, because each time it does tells us something about the people and culture making it. (This is why all the 1980’s Robin Hoods have mullets.) About once a decade, we get at least one new portrayal of the legend. What does this new one say about the people and culture making it?

Welp. It is now clear to me we really are on the worst timeline.

I see a lot of bad movies. I’ve been trying to think of what’s the worst movie I’ve reviewed on this blog, and in terms of big-budget, theatrical releases that I actually paid money to see, this one may be it.

As a starting point, everyone involved in this thinks that Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is the only version of Robin Hood in existence so they just went with that. From there, 50% of the production thought they were remaking A Knight’s Tale, 50% thought they were remaking Batman Begins (I want to point out that that makes Jamie Foxx’s John both Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox and Morgan Freeman’s Azeem from the aforementioned Robin Hood version. This is somehow both genius and terrible.), and 50% thought they were making a hard-hitting political allegory except that everything they know about political fiction they learned from the Cliff Notes of Les Miserables and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

You’ll notice this comes out to 150% of movie. This is because 30% of the time, everybody forgot what they were doing entirely and tried to remake Black Hawk Down but using small-unit assault rifle tactics with bows and arrows. Therefore, at any given moment there is 100% of movie, but which 100% it is is a total crapshoot. Someone check my math but I think I’m right.

There is a mine where all of Nottingham’s peasants work. Much like in that terrible Inhumans TV show from last year, they are mining oppression. Or gold coins, which the Sheriff (who is played by Ben Mendelsohn, who played Krennic in Rogue One, and the Sheriff is basically exactly the same character with exactly the same wardrobe. It’s weird.) sends to be “processed” (I don’t know what this means) by a roomful of monks in wife-beater t-shirts in a setting that looks like every drug manufacturing set in every 90’s drug gang movie. I don’t know why any of this is happening.

There is one named woman character, Marian, with her “I shop at Hot Topic” smoky eye to go with her “I shop at Hot Topic” costumes.

I think this was supposed to be Robin Hood for the video game generation. Now, I think that’s a pretty good idea. But I don’t think anyone making this movie actually understands what they mean by “video game generation.” So they did a car chase but with horses galloping on scaffolding and crashing into each other and falling into ravines, yes?

And that’s when I realized that the reason all the horses looked the same was to make it easier to CGI them when they started falling off scaffolding.

And…I’m out.

 

The Island of Beasts

I have a new story out!  “The Island of Beasts” appears in this month’s issue of Nightmare magazine.

And you’ll be excited to hear:  it’s a werewolf story. Yes, I do consider it part of the Kitty-world continuity. Just 200 years before the Kitty novels.

This is also clear evidence that I’m absolutely still noodling around with my Regency Werewolves ideas.

It’s taking me longer to get to some of my ideas than I thought it would. I just have to remember:  one step at a time. Baby steps. I can do it.