Science Fiction Blog

Erk! I wonder if my niece will want one of these next Christmas?

What next? Barbie and Ken as Shelob and Gothmog?

From Mark Shea, The Lord of the Rings: A Source-Criticism Analysis. A demythologised version telling us what really happened. (Thanks to Anders Gabrielsson for the link)

Teresa Neilsen Hayden has some words of wisdom for aspiring fantasy writers:

If you’re writing novels, it’s not enough to arbitrarily have standard genre fantasy characters running around loose in standard genre fantasy settings, questing for the magic rose-quartz dingleberry while they try to defeat the Dark Lord who’s trying to take over the world. If that’s all your audience wants, they can get it elsewhere.

In other words, if you want to publish a 5000 page epic based on your last D&D campaign, please don’t.

Of course, if you read Making Light, you have to read the comments as well. Otherwise you’ll miss gems like this:

Some of the things I rant about when I’m reading slush:

(1.) Why do Dark Lords only ever want to take over the world? Why don’t they ever want to appear on the cover of Vogue, or bag all the Munros in record time, or convert everyone in the world to Lutheranism?

(2.) Why is it always a Dark Lord? Why isn’t it an evil syndicate or axis or cabal? And while we’re at it, why do Dark Lords never have enough staffers to administer a large operation?

(3.) Why, in worlds that have a long tradition of working magic, a low level of technology, and little or no organized religion or codified theology, does everyone hate and fear magical powers, and persecute people who develop them? Most especially, why do peasants who have no other source of medical or dental care go out of their way to persecute and alienate their witchy-but-kind village healers?

(4.) Why do people who find out they’re heir to great temporal and thaumaturgical power never say “Oh, goody!” And why is their artificially prolonged reluctance to do this obvious thing always referred to as “accepting their destiny” — especially in causal universes in which destiny is not otherwise a recognized force?

(5.) How can illiterate characters living in an illiterate culture have non-phonetic and orthographically outre names?

(6.) How much does this author think his mommy is paying me to read and remember these thickets of superfluous nomenclature, when I haven’t yet seen enough of the plot and characters to care who they are or what’s going to become of them?

I’d better quit now …

BBC NEWS | Technology | When sci-fi forgets the science

Every fan of science fiction film knows that for every genuinely good movie they see, they will have to endure an awful lot of rubbish.

For every innocent gem like Star Wars: A New Hope there is a Phantom Menace. And for every life-affirming classic like The Incredible Shrinking Man there is a soul-destroying Battlefield Earth.

And recently – particularly this summer – there has been an awful lot of rubbish around.

A strange idiocy seems to have over-taken the makers of blockbusters such as The Matrix Reloaded, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and others who are bolstering their creations with some decidedly dodgy science.

One of the golden rules of good SF is that you can take one implausible concept (Faster-than-light travel, psionic powers, self-aware computers, whatever), but you should then follow the implications of that completely logically. Written SF seems follow that rule, but Hollywood SF doesn’t. Perhaps its because so many Hollywood films seem to be made by committees, or that Hollywood screenwriters are not SF writers, and have little or no background in science.

Of course, when a good SF film gets made, often the mainstream critics don’t understand it and give it poor reviews (much like they did to Peter Jackson’s version of Lord of the Rings)

Mullets will cause the downfall of The Republic, at least according to this. I now have horrible images of Jar Jar binks in a mullet.

FAB NEWS, all you wanted to know about the new Thunderbirds film.

FAB1 doesn’t quite seem right not being based on a Rolls Royce somehow. This is the vehicle my nephew and niece saw at Cliveden in Berkshire a couple of weeks ago. On their return they asked me to guess what they’d seen, and I guessed it first try. Don’t know what inspired the guess, apart from the fact I knew a film was in the works, and my nephew is a Thunderbirds fanatic.

I remember seeing the full sized prop of FAB1 driving down Slough High St in the sixties. Since the original series was done with models, I have to wonder why anyone built a full sized replica. But then I’ve seen an original series Batmobile wandering the streets of Britain…

(Link from Scott)