Music blog: Amaranth, by Nightwish

DragonForce - Seasons

After this month?  Expect more Dragonforce. At full volume.

Amaranthe - Invincible

More Music to Write to.



Turn up this one and brace for impact.

The Fury Clock, by Christopher Bunn

The Fury Clock, by Christopher Bunn



...Yeah, I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started this one, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't this.



The flap copy:

MAYHEM, MAGIC AND MANIAC DWARVES

Malix Shandy, the best-looking scoundrel in the kingdom, sets off on a hopeless quest to find the dreaded Fury Clock. If he doesn’t find it in seven days, he’ll suffer a fate worse than death. Teamed up with an enormous ogre and a psychotic dwarf, Shandy starts to think maybe death would be restful after a week in such company. But he doesn't have time to die, not with all the necromancers, vampires, and dragons out to get him.



Brimming with romance, monsters, magic, and deceptive wenches, The Fury Clock is a humorous and rollicking adventure in the tradition of Terry Pratchett and Terry Brooks.

I made the mistake of not seeing the book's full title before I read it, and that probably threw me for the beginning.  What's the full title? The Fury Clock (The Infinite Wheel of Endless Chronicles Book 1).  I think someone might -- just might, mind you -- be making fun of Robert Jordan.  Just a little.



Bunn's style for this book feels like a little of column A, a little of column B, and a pinch of What The Hell Is This?  The vast majority of the book *does* feel like Terry Pratchett writing The Princess Bride, and in the middle, we wander into the Xanth books of Piers Anthony .... sometimes, not in a good way, but, overall, the book works.



I'll unpack that statement for those who aren't complete and total nerds.  We've got our hero, Malix, described as a "man in black" (at least he wasn't a dread pirate) on trial for treason, set free to do the work of a shadowy figure who runs the country from behind the scenes (at least the malevolent shadow was not a tyrant who asked him about angels, a la Pratchett's Going Postal).



Along the way, instead of footnotes, we get little treatises on various and sundry subjects, much like Prachett's novels, or perhaps the The Hitchhiker's Guide. As one of the major scenes in the books take place in the Tavern at the center of the Earth instead of the restaurant at the other end of the galaxy, you can see why it might come to mind.



There are some conversations, like with Anthony, that drag on, and makes you wonder "Where is this going?"  However, unlike Anthony, never, not once, is a page or chapter merely a buildup to one bad pun. For that alone, Bunn should be given tons of awards and dollars.



The casual use of soul gems and describing a princess as "a peach" makes me think "Hmm, a gamer wrote this," but I could be reading into things.



After the 20% mark, the book tends to wander a bit (see: Piers Anthony, cited above). Our hero picks up some companions for some odd reasons, but they do make the journey interesting. By 30%, we're solidly back on track and full speed ahead. So if you get stuck around that point, and can get past it, you're golden.



Did I like the book? Sure. It was fun.  The ease of casual lines like dwarves hankering for a good GLT (goat lettuce and tomato) and platform shoes.  The hippie Charon was fun. There was a dragon that should have been voiced by Stephen Fry. And how can one forget the outlaws with bylaws .... oh, sorry, they were "redistributionists," can't forget that.



However, if you're looking for deep character studies, richly drawn characters with their own personal biography, or Lord of the Rings, then do not approach. This is pure entertainment, and somewhat deranged entertainment at that -- this is a compliment, coming from me.  If you're looking for a rock-solid, fun ride that's Piers Anthony without the terrible, terrible puns, or an American Terry Pratchett, then The Fury Clock is for you.

A villain versus an antagonist

An antagonist is an opponent, but a villain must be stopped.

I'm going to be a little nerdy here and use some rather clear-cut and obvious examples of a villain vs an antagonist, using enemies of Batman....

Yes, I know ... Batman? Really?  Yes, really.  Why? Because everyone at least knows of the majority of the Batman rogue's gallery, so it acts as a good common denominator for everyone involved.

Let's look at some of these folks ...

Few people would think of the Joker as anything less than a villain.  And that would be correct -- but what makes him so?  A complete and utter disregard for human life, for one.  He thinks he's funny when he kills large groups of people, and not only that, but he insists that everyone else finds it funny too.

Is Joker insane? Perhaps -- his fashion sense would indicate that if nothing else -- but does that make him not-evil?  It reminds me of the argument that some victims of child abuse go on to become abusers themselves -- which is garbage. I know more victims of child abuse than is possibly good for me, and while they have an array of neuroses and psychoses, none of them have gone on to be abusers themselves.

Even Alan Moore's The Killing Joke insists that Joker is the result of, as he put it, "one very bad day."  But, even during that comic, Joker is undermined by his victims. Despite creating a very bad day for police Commissioner Jim Gordon, Gordon stays completely sane, and doesn't go off on a killing spree.  He doesn't even put two into Joker's head, which would have been at least justifiable under the heading of "We shoot rabid dogs, don't we?"

The legal definition of insanity is the inability to know the difference between right and wrong. With the Joker, the number of times he theorizes on what he should do next illustrates he's fully well-aware of the difference, he just finds "wrong" a more entertaining option. On the sociopath /sadist scale, he gets a ten.

He might be clinically "insane," but he is also evil. Let's call this a villain.  He's not merely the opposition, not put there by circumstances -- he's like this because he wants to be.

The Riddler is also of the same bent as the Joker.  The Riddler's basic compulsion is to try to prove himself smarter than Batman. That's it. To that end, he plans crimes and leaves clues behind. This looks quite insane ...  Except when you take into account an incident where Riddler is beaten to within half and inch of his life.  He's put into a coma for months, and when he comes out of it, he has both long-term memory loss and a new idea-- he would outsmart Batman by being an even greater Detective!

In short, when Riddler has been on the wrong side of the law, he has chosen to be this way. And his choice makes him a bad guy. Wikipedia has actually described him as being a malignant narcissist ... which we used to call evil.  He's evil and he's having fun. Villain.

In short, "Proving that I'm a super genius is more important than anyone's life," means you're an evil little bastard.

You can see where I'm going with this. At the end of the day, villains are simply evil. But what's an antagonist?



On the other side of the coin (yes, pun), you have former district attorney Harvey Dent, now the criminal known as Two-Face.  In the comic books, Two-Face is a multiple personality, and he is literally not in control of himself; his darker impulses have created an entirely different person, and he requires a coin toss in order to judge how that would work. In Freudian terms, Two-Face is split into Id and Superego, with nothing to moderate between the two except for a coin.  He's just plain old insane.

For instance: during the No Man's Land storyline, Two-Face kidnaps  police commissioner Gordon and puts him "on trial" for breaking a deal. However, Gordon is saved by a vigorous defense by .... Harvey Dent.


I think this puts him on the straight crazy bent (yes, pun).  There's good in him, it's just kinda lost in the white noise that's his brain. Antagonist.


And now for something a little different.

Catwoman is a thief. But she's also been our thief. She robs from the rich, gives to herself, and does the occasional side job for the US government and the CIA. Her later development has put her as more of an anti-hero than even an antagonist.

Though she still occasionally seems to play cat and die Fledermaus, there's still more than enough good in her to proclaim her an antagonist -- when, as, and if she isn't off saving complete strangers because they happen to be within her line of sight when they're in trouble.

And then there's Ivy.

Cosplay Deviants, DragonCon, 2012

Poison Ivy, formerly Pamela Isley, is a nutjob. Completely and totally broken in the head. She has a concept of right and wrong, she just puts plants over people.  Normally, her position as the ultimate eco-terrorist would be something to classify her as just plain evil. After all, she has made this decision, and she has decided that her will is greater than everyone else's moral code.

However, there's a bit of a problem with that. Why, you ask? Because Poison Ivy has had moments where she's protected human beings, despite that she generally thinks humans are inferior to plants. The No Man's Land storyline had her protecting orphaned children in central park and feeding members of the city. She has the occasional breakdown, but she's trying to be a good person. Which is more than I can say for some people I've known in real life.

And, besides, if you turn into vegetable matter and plants talk to you, you'd be a little screwed up in the head as well.

I guess I could go into Harley Quinn, or the Penguin, but I think we'd be beating a dead horse at this point.  Harley is now an anti-hero after years of being a poster girl for battered woman syndrome as Joker's girlfriend.  The Penguin has retired to being a white collar criminal who runs his own lounge.  Bane can't be classified, because his character radically changes depending on who's writing him.

At the end of the day, I never subscribed to the cliche that villains never look in the mirror and see a villain. Or that "they think they're right." Villains don't care about right or wrong.  They just care about themselves. An antagonist might be talked down, or persuaded, or brought away from the dark side; there is the possibility of redemption. The villain likes the dark side, has chosen it, and never wants to leave. It's the difference between Hannibal Lecter (of the books) and Sauron. It's the difference between Joker and Two-Face.  It's the difference between Heaven and Hell.

At the end of the day, it's why I prefer villains in my novels. When I have an antagonist, I tend to redeem them.... eventually.

And trust me, in A Pius Man, there's an opportunity or two for redemption for some. And others just want to die screaming. 

Bayou Renaissance Man: The blindness of the ideologically bound

Bayou Renaissance Man: The blindness of the ideologically bound: One thing that's struck me very forcibly in the whole Tor situation is how utterly blind to reality are many of those on the left/liber...





A good, solid article. To which I only have this to add.



As he started with, objective facts are the problem -- the "facts" of the Puppy Kickers, theirs, not those of the Sad Puppies. Remember, everything is *subjective.* Words mean what they want them to mean. It's postmodern, deconstructionist BS every single step of the way. These guys follow Herbert Marcuse -- where freedom of speech is good for when their enemies are in power, but not for when THEY are in power.

They're not even playing the game of moving the goalposts. The posts are wherever they say they are. Reality is whatever they say it is. And oh, can you define what the meaning of the word "is" is?

... See, this is what happens when they piss off a philosophy major. Give me Aquinas any day.

Though what they don't realize is that we are in control of the narrative. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal, and we've got truth on our side, and you can't kill the truth. It can only be smothered into unconsciousness for a little while.

Music blog: Halo firefight, with a violin

Yes, I know I posted a blog with Lindsay Stirling and the Halo soundtrack before.  But two things -- one, this is a different arrangement (or sounds like it to me) and two .... it has a production value. And shooting things.



I'm good.

Review: Night Wolves.

Last year, I was asked to review something at the Catholic Writer's Guild. The story was called Night Wolves, part of a collection called Continuum: Fables of the Fallen.



The premise?

Fables of the Fallen is the first installment of the Continuum Series. Published by a college writer's group, these six Fantasy/ Sci-fi stories explore the depth of true fallen heroes. Join a Legend Slayer, Mind Reader, Ghostwalker, Mage, and a Medieval Soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in these truly fantastical tales. There is no triumph without the fall.

Let's start at the beginning. The beginning is that I hate short story collections. Never could get into them. Most of the time they're written by authors who can't leave their own universe long enough to create an original character -- so that means unless you've read everything else the author has written, you're SOL.



And then there was Night Wolves.



Night Wolves, by Kathleen Gulo, starts as a rather painless coming of age tale (COAT), with what appears to be werewolves thrown in (when the word "silver" is used to describe teeth and eyes, I think "werewolf").



And then Aragorn showed up. Long story... okay, a short story, but you get the idea.



Keep in mind, "painless" coming of age tale is a compliment. Most COAT trend to 90s Disney movies, and I can't stand them. This was far superior, and makes you keep reading.



This is apparently the prequel to another novel. And I'm glad, because I do want more, and I look forward to it, when it arrives. And it better be soon, because I want to see what happens next. This is the best story of its kind I've read since Peter David.



I look forward to Gulo's next story. Preferably the next novel, because I'd rather not just have one potato chip.

Vlog: reviewing Dan Brown.

You've probably read my review of the Da Vinci Code, if you're a long time fan of the blog. If you're not, well, this will be entirely new to you. There's additional content at the end, by the way. Just for fun.

Spoiler Alert for ... a video game? Halo.

Some people may have noticed that I'm a little wierd. I'm also a bit of a nerd, as my DragonCon reports and my JMS blog of today might tell you.



However, I want to discuss a little bit about one of the most epic bits of science fiction storytelling I've seen outside of Baen publishing.



The Halo video game franchise.



Yup. Video games can have epic writing.



If most of you are thinking "Thanks. We've seen Super Mario Brothers, there is no writing," I respectfully suggest you get your head out of the 80s. And parts of the 90s.



I've only recently been brought back into the world of video games by my friend Jason. He started by giving me a video game called Halo. It was a "first person shooter," which I always figured was short for "a game with no plot, but you get to shoot up anyhthing that gets in your way, or blow them up if you have grenades."



Then I started playing it.



It had a story. It had supporting characters with personalities. It had witty chapter titles and sarcastic one-liners. It was a space-sprawling epic played out on something that resembled Larry Niven's Ringworld -- an artificially designed planet called Halo.



The premise was simple enough: alien jihadists called the Covenant have discovered humans, and they really, really don't like us. The game starts with the player's ship on the run from an alien armada, and runs into Halo, a world that turns out to be a sacred artifact to the jihadists. The player's character is a bioengineered super soldier called a Spartan-II, and wears a Mjolnir battle suit (yes, it's named after the hammer of Thor). The humans get the bright idea to take over Halo before the Covenant do -- this artificial ring world is a moon-sized weapon, after all.



And then, the humans wake something up. Not quite an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, but good enough for government work. Let's just say that they're called The Flood and leave it there. They have a tendency to devour, well, everything.



After waking up said horror, another side to this little war comes up. The artificial intelligence of the Halo ring discovers that, "Hmm, the Flood creatures have been let loose. We have to stop them."



It turns out that the eldritch horror isn't from beyond time and space, but from one hundred million years ago. The Halo rings were built to stop them. But, the people fighting the flood back then decided to hold on to a few samples for research, and so the species wouldn't die out (I always knew rabid environmentalists would be the ruin of us).



All goes perfectly well until the player discovers how the Halo rings kill the flood-- by erradicating all life bigger than a microbe. The flood starve. End of problem. When the Spartan-II and his sidekick object to this plan, the AI that has been chattering at you for a whole level of the game turns nasty.



Did I mention that the AI is insane?



Soon, the game becomes a four-sided battle. Alien jihadists are still trying to kill you. The flood are trying to kill everyone. And the AI that you've pissed off has his own army of flying, laser-wielding drones who are also out to kill you, the flood, the jihadists, and everything else in its way.



And that's just the first game.



The Halo universe is so dense in background and in story, they've written at least half a dozen novels worth of material, and they're making more.  Comic book and Star Trek favorite Peter David has written a comic book volume from the Halo-verse, as has William C. Dietz, another author with his own writing credits -- though the first author to be offered the job was Timothy Zahn.

SPOILER ALERT.

There might be one or two people upset by the end of Halo 3.  The third game sought to wipe out the Flood, end the war with the alien jihadists, and  finally end the threat of the Halo rings.   By and large, they succeeded.



However, the character you play, the Spartan-II, is last seen drifting in space in half a starship -- bad things happen when a wormhole closes and the ship is only halfway through it.

Since Halo 3, several Halo games have been released -- prequels, side-stories, and tales that never answered the simple question: Whatever happened to Master Chief, Spartan 117



Halo Fans will be happy to know that the trail for Halo 4 starts where Halo 3 leaves off.

Inspiring Authors: J. Michael Straczynski

Every once in a while, I look over my writing style, and I look at what I've taken away from the authors I've been exposed to.



The first, and most important writing influence is someone named J. Michael Straczynski (JMS).



JMS, who I have mentioned once or twice, was an executive producer on Murder, She wrote, created Babylon 5, and writes almost anything else he can get his hands on. He's written comics, TV, novels, science fiction, battling demons....

Just look him up on amazon, buy everything except for “Rising Stars” and “Supreme Power.”



I'm not joking. Go now.



If you saw Thor -- and who didn't? You didn't? Go see it. I'll wait..... Back now? You liked it? Good. -- JMS had a cameo in the film as the first fellow to find Thor's hammer, and organized that big sequence with trying to drag out the hammer with a truck.



There is Tribulations, a book about demonic possession in modern LA. Surprisingly well put together and very religious ... And he's an atheist. So, he at least knows how to appreciate religion, even if it's only for use as fantasy fodder.

I first experienced the writing of JMS a very long time ago, before I even knew who the man was. Originally an author for television, he worked his way up from cartoons and into prime time. He penned the only episode of The Real Ghostbusters that I can remember.  Twenty years after the original airing of Murder, She Wrote, all of the episodes I knew off the top of my head happened to be written by him (if you remember an episode in the Psycho house, that would be Joe).

I first became aware of Joe Straczynski with his television show Babylon 5; at the time, it seemed to be a rip-off of a Star Trek program that had just come on called Deep Space 9. Then odd things started happening. To start with, the show had character. The characters on the show had personalities. They had backgrounds. They had character flaws. When there was fighting, there were actual military tactics, and the science fiction .... had science.

If you are not a follower of science fiction, you may not be aware of this, but to find military tactics in most science fiction filmed media is almost as rare as finding science in a Star Trek film. As mentioned during our week of Infinite Space, Infinite God II, most sci-fi will resort to technobabble before using actual science. Babylon 5 is the first science fiction television show that ever explained how their artificial gravity worked.

With military tactics -- how much in the way of tactics did anyone see in Star Wars or Star Trek that did not amount to "Watch two armies. See them ram into each other. See them ignore that space is three dimensional."

With Babylon 5, NASA has asked permission to use some of their designs, because they can't come up with better ideas.  If you ever hear about a NASA space construction craft called a "Star Fury," it's because JMS allowed them to use it on the condition that it shared the name it had on the tv show....

Constant readers of this blog will see the fingerprints of JMS all over it. The most popular blog post Disasters to Marvel At was made possible by Joe Straczynski. After Babylon 5, JMS went on to writing comic books; in particular, Amazing Spider Man (ASM). Being a fan of Straczynski's, I followed. It was the first time I had picked up a comic book in about five years. At least.

And it was a gloriously enjoyable run. If you ever saw an issue of ASM that involved Spider-Man dealing with the 9-11 attacks, that was JMS' doing. It was a throwaway issue in a grand story arc that had Peter Parker questioning his own origins, pondering whether or not he was part of a larger plan, and finding himself embroiled more and more with supernatural problems. The solutions became more cerebral and scientific than requiring an ability to pound someone into dust.

Also, in pure JMS fashion, he took the marriage of Peter Parker and made it work -- after all, Straczynski's strong suit is having two people interact with each other. And it's nothing like having a reconciliation in the middle of a super-powered smackdown at Denver airport.

And then there was the surprisingly epic ASM 500, where JMS managed to condense the entire 500 isues before into one, simple question.

Which is why I was somewhat enraged when editorial mandate came down from a clear blue sky and decreed that every Marvel comic would be dragooned into the Event of the Week. The story arc for Straczynski's Spider-Man run was stomped on by the far inferior Civil War. And, while I liked what JMS managed to do with it, despite editorial mandate (it was the only part of the Civil War I remotely enjoyed), and he managed to make the follow-up Back in Black, a fun read, at the end of the day, management came down and destroyed, literally, every achievement JMS wrote over the course of his six-year run.

When I saw JMS at New York Comic Con, he had a running phrase: "Joe, you suck." He even had the audience repeat it back to him.  However, between the links above, there's a reason why I think it should be "Joe (Quesada), you suck."

JMS would also take over duties on Thor, where he placed the Norse deity in the middle of New Mexico (Thor movie fans, sound familiar?)

After Marvel and he had a falling out, he went direct to DC. He did some spectacular Team-ups of the Brave and the Bold, tried to work on a new arc for Wonder Woman, and even a Superman arc called Grounded. Right now, he's heading the bestseller list with his graphic novel Superman: Earth One.  If Warner Brothers is smart, they'll reboot the Superman movie franchise with Earth one as a model.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM JMS.

I learned how to write people. Taking a cue from Rod Serling, JMS knew how to make a conversation be dramatic with just two people in a room, no ticking bomb required. He knew how to work dynamics with different characters for different results. He even went so far to lock two people in a room together, he literally trapped two characters in an elevator.

If you wondered why my short story One Way to Stay out of Jail consisted mostly of two people in a room just talking to each other, you can probably guess. It's the joy of having characters (some of whom are deeply flawed) interacting with each other.

Another thing I got from JMS -- how to take cliche's and turn them inside out.

For example...

Situation: Two people who hate each other are trapped in an elevator; fires are burning outside. If they don't work together, they will die.
Hollywood standard procedure: The trapped duo will overcome their grievances in order to stay alive.
JMS: One character says to another "I'm not going to help. This way, I can watch you die and I won't be prosecuted."

It's fun.

In A Pius Man, there is a reason that the book has plenty of deep, in-depth conversations between people who have some obvious flaws .... although a lot of it revolves around Sean Ryan, who is, himself, really weird.

Further Reading.

Other works by JMS include.

Demon Night (I haven't read it yet, but it should be fun)



Othersyde: Another book I loved. High school, meet demonology 101.

Two high school nerds, "losers," tormented and tortured on a routine basis, buy curiosities -- two telegraph signal senders.



And then, the devices start tapping out Morse code on their own.



It was elegantly written, and even made the angst of high school tolerable. And, no, there is no Twilight level, whiny-angsty BS. I would take a power drill to my head before I even read anything remotely like it, to heck with recommending it.

Book of Lost Souls: A late, lamented comic book series JMS wrote while at Marvel. While there were only five issues of this run, I think it has a good, solid story arc. that reads well even though Marvel pulled the plug on it early on.

 

Straczynski Unplugged: A collection of short stories, mostly novelized versions of screenplays JMS did for The New Twilight Zone back in the 80s. I can only assume these few were all he did, otherwise the show would have done much, much better.



These were all awesome.  I suggest clicking on the link and buying the book, rather than trying to find the episodes on youtube.



Trust me on this. 

Under the heading of both "touching" and "I never saw this coming," was Silver Surfer: Requiem. The premise: the Silver Surfer originally made a devil's bargain to save his home planet, becoming the Surfer, herald to a planet-eating being called Galactus. Years later, the Silver Surfer's own body is turning against him. Everything that makes him the Surfer is breaking down. The story arc is broken down into four parts. Benedictus, Sanctus, Kyrie, and Agnus Dei. All parts of the funeral mass.

Let's put it this way: I never liked Silver Surfer, and this brought me to tears ... yes, I'm a nerd.

Bullet Points: Another Marvel project. A simple "What if?"



What if the assassin who killed Captain America's creator completed his task 24 hours earlier, and, at the same time, killing one of the bodyguards, a Ben Parker, what would the world look like?



The only thing that I've read that compares to it in comics is the ASM 9-11 issue ... also by JMS.

-- Okay, this was pure, unadulterated awesome. An LA cop finds himself caught in the crossfire between Heaven and Hell, and loses his soul, becoming one of the lost people of the Midnight Nation.



In order to get his soul back, he has to cross all of America to New York City to face the Devil himself.Midnight Nation

Squadron Supreme and Rising Stars -- the only works I can honestly not endorse. Even JMS has complaints about Squadron Supreme.

Update: Sorry, I'm from New York, the Midwest, unfortunately, does look alike to me -- New Mexico or Oklahoma. Especially since the artwork in the JMS Thor comic and the images in the Thor movie looked the same to me. I suspect Kenneth Branaugh looked at the comic and said "This doesn't match Oklahoma, where does it match? Nex Mexico? We're there."