In Memory of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury died yesterday. As far as I know, he was the last surviving member of the "old sci-fi" club: the writers who came from the same wellspring of wonder that birthed Wells and Verne. I don't know what resulted in the eventual... corruption? No. Corruption isn't quite the correct word. Cynicizing. Is that word? I just made it one.

I don't know what resulted in the eventual cynicizing of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Perhaps it was the Vietnam War and rising social inequality. Perhaps it was increasing cynicism in politics and the rise of the conservative parties. Perhaps it was the discovery of the real world by the idealistic hippies. Whatever it was, science fiction and fantasy have, by and large, rejected wonder and hope in favor of cynical depression.

"The universe is a little emptier right now," Texas A&M Commerce English Professor Robin Ann Reid told Yahoo News. She wrote a book about Bradbury's works and sits on the board of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.  "There's less of that sense of joy and exulation that he was writing in his works all the way to the end."

Instead of wonder, we get gritty pessimism and are told that it is adult. That old Sci-Fi was kid's stuff. You know what? Screw that. How many hard science writers do we have operating today? How many writers write with cold, exacting knowledge of the science that is in their work? Damn few.

That's not to say that there aren't any out there. They continue to bubble underneath the churn. One can only hope that we will look back upon this has an era in sci-fi and fantasy, and that we will eventually move on to another era.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Bradbury wrote about discovering science fiction stories as a child growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, and his love for his grandfather. "I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, "Take me home!" I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities," he wrote.

Where is the next generation of wide-eyed dreamers? That's what I want. I don't want Blade Runner redux. I don't want another William Gibson.

One must wonder why Sci-Fi is so pessimistic. Science Fiction was at its most optimistic during the freaking Cold War. There was very good reason to be angry and cynical, and yet some of the most hopeful works ever written were done during that time. Times are economically a bit pissy, right now, but aside from that, times are great!

We are more aware of the ethical and ecological problems of progress than ever before. Equality is rising. Women are nearing pay parity with men in the Western World. Gay marriage is just around the corner. Disregarding the American extremist movement, religion is dying. This is a great time to be alive. And yet, Sci-Fi thinks that we are one step away from global apocalypse.

Perhaps that's it. Perhaps when things are actually rather good, a book that just tells you how good things are isn't very interesting. It's not novel. Truly, the very word "novel" stems from the word for "new." Sci-Fi, perhaps more so than any other genre, must be new to be captivating.

But I don't care about that. I care about what I want. And I want the old stuff. I want wonder, and magic, and hope. Because I can't buy distopia. It's just too damned improbable. We could have blown ourselves up... and yet we didn't. That is as near a miracle as has ever happened in history. How can I not be optimistic after that?

Mike Labossiere said it well over at io9.

As a science fiction fan (and a very, very minor writer), I am somewhat inclined to agree with this. In my own case, I find myself loading my Kindle with science fiction from the early to mid twentieth century and ignoring the new novels. In part, this is pure thrift — I can, for example, get H. Beam Piper's works for free. However, part of it is because the new stuff seems to lack something possessed by the good old stuff. While I have thought about this for some time, I am beginning to suspect that my experience seems to match Stephenson's: the new stuff generally seems to lack a certain thread of optimism that ran through the good old stuff — even the old dystopian stuff.

I will miss Bradbury. He was a bit silly in some ways, but he was optimistic and idealistic. He had wonder. He had hope. He had dreams of a better world. Where is that, today?

Mass Effect 3 Disappointment Was Expected

As this article, weirdly on LiveScience shows, some people seem to think that video games are a new form of story telling. They are not. They do not "free" story telling from the shackles, because story telling is inherently a one-way street. If the person listening to the story becomes involved, they must be involved within limits else it turns into role-playing... which is why role-playing games are called role-playing games. If the ending changes, it is not the same story.

World of Warcraft is not a story. Yes, there is an overarching story that drives many of the major events, but millions of players have nothing to do with that. They spend all of their time wandering around the open world, "writing" their own story. Yes, there is a narrative to it, but a story must have a purpose; it must have some end. And in games, that some end must be pre-determined. And even with games where there are multiple endings, there is always one ending that is counted as the true ending, which is usually the one that takes the longest to achieve and must match a set number of variables in the game. Unless you count Silent Hill's "dog" ending.

For example, if we wanted a game to be a real interactive story, there would never be something like a "game over" state. All endings would be a true ending. But in many games, you can die within the first thirty seconds of game time. To call that a legitimate ending would be absurd. There must be limits. In a real story, there are no limits, only a creative vision. It is obvious why this is so: a player can easily exceed the limits of a created world, because any created world must necessarily be finite.

Games will never be pure stories because they must be within the limits of game rules. For example, I love Halo. I read the Halo novels like Fall of Reach. While far from sci-fi genius, they were decent fluff. The problem is that the stories didn't make ANY sense in relation the game. The description of the super-soldiers (of which you play one in the game) is so beyond anything, that they would have been an unstoppable juggernaut. Strong enough to lift cars. Can run at 60mph.

Perhaps a more famous example, at least in the world of video games, is that of Final Fantasy VII. This was an era-defining game. It is frequently held up as the first truly cinematic attempt at making a video game. It also includes one of the most famous deaths in all of video-gamedom: Aeris. Only, according to the rules set out by the game, it doesn't make sense. On any given play-through, Aeris could have died dozens of times; you could always resurrect her with a spell.

Why should her scripted death be any different? Because it was required by the story. There are some games that try to get around this, by making in-game deaths permanent, one that sticks in my mind is the (old) game Gain Ground. But that was part of the game. Everyone understood the rules because they were communicated explicitly to the player. In a narrative game, if deaths are always made permanent, the player is left in a state of confusion. Should they restart? Is this death avoidable? Is a death at this point necessary?

You'd have crazed players replaying the same part of a game over and over in an attempt to save everyone's life. Conversely, you can have players who charge through a game with reckless abandon, and are left with no one alive, crippling the possible story in that way.

No, I'm sorry. Games are and always will be an imperfect story medium. They are no more liberating from the shackles of story requirements than Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Granted, there are advantages to this. A game should not be seen as a story. It should be seen as a game with rules where certain narrative bits are essentially rewards for completing tasks. To go back to the Silent Hill example, that dog ending doesn't make any sense. It's absurd beyond reason. And that's great! In a real story, it would be bound by the limitation of having only a single ending, which in the terms of a story isn't much a limitation, but it's still a limitation as regards entertainment. In a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of concept, the author can write tons of endings, some of which make no sense, simply because it's funny.

Working toward surprises, hidden rewards, undiscovered narrative elements, it's all part of experiencing a set narrative more fully. For example, people love to discover unfinished versions of books or movies. Deleted scenes, unfinished scripts, all of them are gobbled up by dedicated fans of something. They do this because it is the exact same process as going through a game and finding hidden bits of the story. It is a narrative that isn't simply delivered. It is a narrative discovered. That is what makes games both less and more than a book or a movie.

X-Men First Class And My Issues With Comic Book Movies

I just saw X-Men First Class. I liked it. It was well-directed, stylish, and some truly excellent performances. But I would never watch it again.

A great review of a movie explains perfectly why the critic did or didn't like said movie. For example, Roger Ebert's review of Dark City made me go back and watch it again, and it is now one of my favorite sci-fi's. My partner, Danielle, ruined the movie Aladdin for me by asking where the hell the narrator/salesman from the beginning of the film went.

Likewise, a great review, by whom I've forgotten, for the first X-Men ruined the film for me and further drove home the importance of keeping comic book worlds and the real world separated. Basically, the whole use of mutation as an analogy for racial undertones and bigotry is just amazingly stupid. Fear and hatred of black or Asian people is wrong because they're just people, they just look slightly different. Fear and hatred of someone who can level whole cities with their mind is very, very legitimate. Even mutants should be terrified of other mutants.

As it is with X-Men First Class. They place the movie during the early 1960's and have the X-Men stop World War III by being the actual reason the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't come to guns. First problem, this opens up a metric-crap-ton of historical inconsistencies, but disregarding those, there are issues on the story's own terms.

For example, people don't know about mutants? How did WWII even happen? You're telling me that not ONE of the people that the Nazi's massacred wasn't a mature mutant? There are just now, spontaneously, millions of mutants? And ALL of them are in hiding? No. I'm sorry. Some of them would turn into superheroes and some into supervillains. And that logical requirement works just fine in comic books, because that's what comic books are: heroes and villains.

It is impossible to shoehorn in comic book logic (I refer to as a cause-&-effect system) into real-world logic. It was the reason why I found both new Batman films insufferable. Batman Begins took itself gravely seriously, and its climax centered around a microwave gun that magically doesn't effect the 80% of the human body that is water. It was stupid.

First Class isn't that stupid, but every second of the movie has logical issues with its setup, logical issues that I just couldn't get past to fully enjoy the film.

I think the reason why my favorite recent comic book film is Iron Man is that the director, Jon Favreau, understands the nature of comic book movies perfectly. When interviewed about the upcoming Avengers film, he said he didn't envy the producers of that film since they had to try to merge the technological world of Iron Man with the magical world of Thor. He said that comic book movies have to operate in their own worlds, disconnected from others, for them to work. Why so few directors understand this is beyond me.

It's not just comic book films, though. It's all of Hollywood. When critics refer to jarring shifts in tone, usually in a derogatory sense, they're frequently referring to shifts in cause & effect. For example, a movie that was borderline unwatchable for me at times was the 2008 film Hamlet 2. There were scenes of slapstick C&E, scenes of real-world C&E, scenes of uplifting teen drama, Saturday Night Live, and genuine attempts at pathos. None of these can live together in a film.

As a filmmaker, you must know precisely in which universe of cause & effect your movie is going to live. All characters must then follow that system. You can't decide that you want some drama, and suddenly have everything shift to a dramatic system in hopes of wringing out a tear or two. You'll end up like Family Guy, which, regardless of its quite genuine humor and inventiveness, is horribly written.

As a writer, this is difficult, which is probably why so few do it. You must think out the complex network of effects that any event in your story would have within the world that you've chosen. This is the reason why so many super-dramas are very tightly scripted. They only write a few characters, and what they do, who they are, and where they live is highly limited. It allows the writer freedom to concentrate on the characters about which they actually care, and not have to worry about potential inconsistencies and plot holes involving hypothetical outside variables.

Unfortunately for those lazy writers that don't want to do go through the trouble, this is what makes good writing. Without it, you may as well not bother. Stop clogging up the gears of movie production with your shitty scripts and make room for story tellers who have something worthwhile to say.

Ladmags, Cosmo, and Magazines for Me.

I used to get subscriptions to both Playboy and Rolling Stone. In both cases, I just got tired of the magazine's voice. I really did read Playboy for the articles. Frankly, I think most people who read it do so for the articles at this point. It's barely porn, and just having naked women posing there is terrible masturbation material. But those articles were the same damned thing over and over.

I think Playboy became something of an anachronism, and this is evident it its formulation of what it means to be male. In the Playboy world, "male" is a state of being where one is confident to the point of being weird, dressed in expensive clothing, smokes cigars, fucks or could fuck every woman he comes across, and drives a Ferrari.

Rolling Stone didn't have a specific formulation of masculinity, but instead is just very male-oriented. One only needs look as far as the "Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Almost universally male and white. The magazine spends most of its time ranting about republicans and discussing rock & roll, which is mostly male, and rap, which is mostly male. Females usually show up in the celebrity photos section, frequently on the beach.

Just look at the covers. I went through Rolling Stone's cover archives and counted all the covers with men, women, and then non-sexy-symbol women.

Like this. She's attractive, but she's not on the cover simply to look hot. She looks rock & roll.

This one is blatantly used for sex purposes. So now you understand my criteria. I also ignored political covers, covers with an ensemble multi-sex cast, and anything about current events.

Total count? From 2000 to 2009, One hundred and fifty-five covers with men, sixty with women. And of those women, twenty-seven were there just get hard over. Further, of the women, eight were either Madonna or Britney Spears. According to RS, 58% of their readership is male, so I guess it's not surprising that they cater to male readers to a degree. But I just don't understand how an active thinker wouldn't get bored with this.

Or take the newest issue of DETAILS, which fashions itself as the younger, puerile, slightly retarded brother of Esquire, discussing the remasculation of the American male. Remasculation?! Ok. Fuck you. That's all I can say to that. To even assume that we need to somehow be given our masculinity back, and to have the audacity to advertise that you know shit-about-shit to write about it, or tell us what it is, that just blows my mind.

What the fuck is going on in pop-culture, today? Are white men the world over utterly threatened by women? Like those entirely insane Super Bowl ads that had this simmering misogyny underlying every situation. How vapid and shallow must a man be to find this nonsense entertaining and appealing? How could any man find the voice of Playboy, DETAILS, or Esquire stimulating for a long period of time? How does he not get bored?!

Fuck writing for men! Fuck writing for this trite, pigeon-holed concept of masculinity that demands every story be framed in such a way as to discuss the subject of kinky sex and Lamborghinis. Write for people, not men.

This is coming from a male perspective, obviously. I'm sure there are legions of women out there who feel similarly to Cosmo or Redbook. But at least those magazines rarely wrap themselves up in fake, pseudo-intellectual, classy, wannabe haute-couture pretenses. There's nothing classy about them. Cigars are nasty, most people think Ferrari drivers are assholes, and discussing Plato in public makes you look like a dick. Reading GQ doesn't make you intellectual or classy. It makes you look like that fourteen-year-old, dripping with Axe, wearing a Gucci belt he bought on eBay that was too big so he had to drill extra holes. No one wants to fuck you, and any woman who does will give you the clap.

I want stuff written for me as me, not for me as a MAN. I'm not a man. I'm me. I am who I am, and that is a person with certain interests. Write about those things. Write it with a certain personality that makes you unique, and I'll lap it up. The alternative is where we're at now. I'm bored, I don't read your shitty magazines, and an increasingly large number of people don't either.

No. Instead they're reading AskMen.com, which is, somehow, even worse. Ugh. Men suck.

A Tribute

Daisy Daisy, give me your answer do
I'm half crazy all for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
And I can't afford a carriage
But you'd look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two.