Tag: Science Fiction

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Book Review General Blog

Vorkosigan Saga: Mirror Dance

A painting of a pair of baby twins, both swaddled in white. The twins have similar appearances and expressions, but one is much paler than the other. They lay on a black background.
Because they're twins.

Big news in weird decisions by me: I’ve started reading a lengthy novel series by picking up a random installment in the middle. That series is The Vorkosigan Saga, and that installment is Mirror Dance.

Now, in my defense, I didn’t go in entirely unprepared. I had previously read several of the Vorkosigan short stories and skimmed a scan of A Civil Campaign, and most importantly I had received a tremendous blow-by-blow description of every single major event in the series from my sister, Daisy, a certified Vorkosigan maniac. When I happened upon a cache of Vorkosigan novels left out for the taking, I captured them and brought them back home, determined to see what enchanted my sister so.

I started with Mirror Dance because I was going on a train trip and the pile of free Vorkosigans I found included two copies of Mirror Dance, so I didn’t have to fear retribution from Daisy if the book was damaged by Amtrak’s tender mercies. At last, I would immerse myself in Vorkosimania.

The Vorkosigan Saga, written by Lois McMaster Bujold, comprises a number of novels, novellas, and short stories concerning the adventures of one Miles Vorkosigan, the son of space nobility, who is a minor genius and deals with a number of chronic health problems. As he is the son of a major Vor Lord (yeah, really) of the planet Barrayar, he has many terrible responsibilities and constantly confronts the prejudices of a planet set against people with visible disabilities. He also goes through a lot of Drama, on both the interplanetary scale and the interpersonal, as well as sometimes the cringe. The publishing dates on the series extend from the late eighties to the late twenty-tens, so journeying back into the deep archives uncovers its fair share of uncomfortable material. Mirror Dance specifically has some moments of unpleasantness regarding the narration around Miles’ nonbinary coworker, as well as some eye-rolling but comparatively minor moments of orientalism.

On the plus side, Mirror Dance is a truly soap opera or Bollywood-level plot. Miles’ somewhat deranged clone brother, Mark – originally grown by villains to kill Miles and family – comes out of hiding to suborn Miles’ private mercenary group in an ill-fated attempt to rescue other young clones who will soon be harvested for their organs. Miles discovers Mark’s altruistic treachery and rushes off to try and stop him. He catches up to Mark just slightly too late. That’s when it gets complicated.

There’s soooooo many moments of twin hijinks in this. Mark and Miles continually switch identities, including another cover identity of Miles’, Admiral Naismith. One gets abducted and pretends to be the other, then the other gets caught and has to pretend to be the first one. Miles’ friends, romantic interests, and coworkers are tormented by the doubling of their Vorkosigan-related troubles. The Vorkosigans’ enemies are entirely reduced to despair by the end.

Mirror Dance also goes to some very dark places. The tone of the Saga as a whole is interesting. Bujold possesses a solid, straightforward prose style with a wry edge which keeps the reader bumping along comfortably with every plot twist, and she throws in jokes and humorous encounters with near-clockwork regularity. But every so often, she pulls back the curtain to remind us that humans in space are just as capable of depravity as humans here on Earth.

The vessel of much of the darkness in Mirror Dance is Mark. While Miles, despite the challenges of his youth, could count on a loving, powerful, wealthy family to support him through everything, Mark grew up in the hands of violent men with dark intentions and a profound hatred for the people from whose DNA Mark grew. He trained as an assassin, but he was also relentlessly victimized by his creators: bullied, tortured, and eventually sexually assaulted. This damage causes Mark to act in some very unwise and unethical but realistic ways. His trauma around intimacy drives him to nearly reenact his own abuse on someone very vulnerable, which will understandably turn a certain subset of readers against the character and story entirely. But Mark’s journey to redemption gives the story a hard core of genuine feeling which elevates it above a simple space romp, and his tremendous failings make him more poignant and sympathetic in my eyes. As someone who’s made my own mistakes and had my own mental challenges, I felt for Mark, even if some of the mistakes he made were much worse than mine.

I won’t try to claim that Mirror Dance is the best entry point for The Vorkosigan Saga. But it worked for me. More than any of the previous stories I’d read in the series, Mirror Dance captured my interest because of the strong and compelling central relationship between Miles and Mark. This relationship grounded the sillier and soapier moments and leavened the darkest and most serious ones. I would like to read more of Miles’ adventures, if only to make sure Mark is okay.

Categories
General Blog Television

Intersections in Real Life

Back when I had my Cohost blog, I wrote a post about the Babylon 5 episode “Intersections in Real Time”. This is one of my favorite episodes of B5 and, in my opinion, some of B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski’s strongest writing ever. A total format shift and one of the only episodes to have no sequences on the titular space station, this episode has our hero, John Sheridan, imprisoned by Earth’s fascist government. Sheridan is tortured in the hopes that he will sign a false confession renouncing his beliefs and supporting EarthGov’s xenophobic platform. The episode is functionally a two-man play, a rhetorical war between Sheridan and the bland officious technician assigned to torture him.

The last time I wrote about this episode, I wrote about its most quotable climactic moment, in which John Sheridan insists that he can still win his war, even here, even alone, simply by never giving in to the demands of the state. I’m not going to repeat myself too thoroughly here – this is just set up for what I want to say now.

The torturer casts doubt on the idea that Sheridan’s faith in resistance to the evils of EarthGov will ever lead him to victory. Sheridan tells the torturer that he wins, “every time [he says] no.” Every refusal is a tiny revolution.

Foremost among J. Michael Straczynski’s works outside Babylon 5 is his autobiography, Becoming Superman. This is a book which I would genuinely recommend to almost anyone (over the age of, like, 13; it has some deeply disturbing scenes), whether or not they have any interest in science fiction television, comic books, or the screen arts. The core of the book is the terrifying abuse and misery which Straczynski undergoes as a child and the escape from it provided by his devotion to nerd standbys like Superman. 

The insanity of Straczynski’s childhood is engineered and escalated by his father, a man of mindbogglingly low character who subjected his wife and children to an endless reign of terror. Straczynski’s father was a no-shit actual real life Nazi who helped do the Holocaust. That is the level of moral impoverishment we are discussing here.

Returning to B5 episodes like “Intersections in Real Time” after reading Becoming Superman, I saw so much of Straczynski’s personal story in the work. His firsthand experience with day-in, day-out torment. His desire to inoculate against fascism, thanks to a childhood spent imprisoned within it. His certainty that there is value in moral victory, even if that moral victory does not liberate you from your oppressor immediately.

There are other parts of Becoming Superman that I thought while rewatching the episode as well. Late in life/the book Straczynski is diagnosed as autistic, and so I pondered the ways in which embracing one’s abnormal subjectivity is another kind of resistance, one which must be constantly shored up against a world which says “But why can’t you be normal after all?” After Babylon 5, Straczynski collaborates with the Wachowskis, maybe the most prominent transgender film directors in Hollywood, to make work that highlights LGBTQ+ life. That’s not Straczynski’s personal experience, but by then he knows what it means to win just by living and still believing, and so I see how he and the Wachowskis might still be able to connect.

Death of the author is a major critical concept for a reason, and it is worth approaching work on its own merits and for the meanings you the interactor draw from it. It also helps you maintain a little distance from the creator, which is important in our current era of “hero-worship perpetually curdling into misconduct revelations”.

After reading Becoming Superman, though, I just can’t stop seeing the author in Babylon 5. Straczynski is the show in a very real way that’s hard to articulate. Later, if he gets busted for crimes, that’s going to make it suck a lot for us fans, but for now it’s a powerful relationship, a sharpening and a clarifying of what the show is for. 

I recommend both Babylon 5 and Becoming Superman, not only for the chance to watch a great show and read a great book, but for the reminder that survival is a kind of bravery, one that is the first step towards achieving everything else we long for.

Categories
Comics General Blog

Life in the Savage Time

A sketch of American Civil War soldiers riding horses towards the viewer of the image. The men look resigned, despairing, and fearful. They appear to be soldiers for the Union Army.
Yeah, I know how he feels.

The other day I was watching some of my favorite episodes of the Justice League cartoon. I went straight to the end of season 1 for the the three-part season finale: “The Savage Time”. 

In “The Savage Time”, the Justice League (sans Batman) arrives home from a space mission to find the Earth changed in chilling ways. Touching down in Metropolis, they discover jackbooted sci-fi commandos patrolling the streets beneath building-length banners of one Vandal Savage. The League fall in with this timeline’s Bruce Wayne, still a bat-adjacent vigilante, but one who battles the Savage regime rather than supercriminals. The League discover that Vandal Savage used time travel to change the fate of the Second World War, helping the Nazis win while appointing himself the Supreme Leader of the regime. With Bruce’s help, they find the time travel technology Savage used and head back to the ‘40s.

In the past, the League explores different ways to resist Savage. Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter get entangled in espionage at the heart of the regime in Berlin. Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash assist the Blackhawks, a group of airmen from the various countries occupied by the Nazis. Green Lantern, separated from the others after his ring loses its charge, falls in with a group of marines behind enemy lines. Lantern, himself a former marine, fights to prove himself against the hostility and suspicion of certain members of the unit, a plot point I see in sharper relief as an adult with a knowledge of the history of US military segregation. The cartoon show uses the John Stewart incarnation of Green Lantern, who is a Black man. His immediate rejection by one of the white marines of Easy Company makes almost too much sense.

It’s Lantern’s lonely struggle which brings him out of all the Leaguers to have the final confrontation with Vandal Savage. Again, as an adult, I see the choice to make Lantern the one who fights the Nazi overlord with greater poignancy. He takes Savage on one-on-one, without his power ring and without any superpowers, and he saves the world by crashing Savage’s command ship. Savage goes down with the ship, alone except for his bumbling subordinates. Lantern gets rescued by his teammates. They go back through the time portal and find their world restored, no one besides the Justice League able to remember the brief authoritarian perversion of reality.

It’s all right there. I would be insulting your intelligence to go on at length about why I went straight here when I decided I wanted to rewatch some of this show. This three-parter is likely one of the first places I learned about who Nazis were and what they believed. Like Indiana Jones, the other place I first ran into them, “The Savage Time” doesn’t dive deep into their repugnant ideology, but it lays down a couple clear lines: the Nazis are stupid, they are venal, they are violent, and we don’t like them. When we see them, we fight them.

For standards & practices reasons, the creators of Justice League couldn’t show anyone dying onscreen in the cartoon, except under very specific circumstances. They always have to show enemy pilots parachuting back to earth. They really test this rule here. There are several Nazi footsoldiers who definitely fully eat shit at the hands of our heroes, who – as you may know – are otherwise vehemently against killing their enemies.

I’m with it. If you’re a Nazi, Superman would straight up let you die, and he’d be right to do it. Fuck you.

But I was much more moved by another part of the story, the scene where Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash meet the Blackhawks and hear their story. The show is called Justice League, Superman is the most iconic superhero ever created, but when he hears what the Blackhawks have accomplished and what they want to do to stop the Nazis, he says “How can we help?”

Not “I’m in charge now”. Not “Here’s what we’ll do”. “How can we help?”

It’s easy to fall into hero fantasies in a dark time. I’m literally talking to you about a superhero show; I am not immune to propaganda. But there’s something really important here, to me – Superman sees the fight and he knows which side he’s on. He also knows the Blackhawks have been in it a lot longer than he has. He puts aside his identity as basically the most important person in the whole DC universe to find out what they need from him, how he can give his power to them.

Even Superman knows that saving the world is not about being a hero, a liberator, an icon remembered forever. It’s about seeing those who are already in the fight and asking “How can I help?”

Categories
Cinema General Blog

Blow Out and Dark Waters Are the Two Best X-Files Movies

An apocalyptic image of chaos and violence in a city with a large figure of death standing at the center
Just another day in America in 2025.

The X-Files is an insanely uneven work. Several episodes of the original run make me feel like I am touching God. Several episodes of the original run make me feel like God is pulling my eyeballs out and beating me about the head and feet with them. I don’t talk about the reboot run.

The X-Files movies are not uneven. They are both bad. Truly bad, like extra-long, extra-meandering, extra-dumb episodes of the show. Not as bad as the episodes of the show that William Gibson wrote, but still bad. Every so often, however, I come across a movie that’s smoking that shit that made Chris Carter crazy, and that’s doing it in a good way. I like to pretend those are the X-Files movies and that the real ones never happened to me.

What are the criteria for a good X-Files movie? First and most important, it must have an oppressive paranoid air. A conspiracy is ideal. Every moment must be heavy with anxiety and danger. Secondly, it must have some intention of witnessing the horror at the heart of the American project. This can be metaphorical or theoretical, but it can also be a direct confrontation with American history or the American present. Thirdly, it has to go beyond just making sense. As any seasoned X-Files viewer knows, the show makes no damn sense, especially in its best episodes. I’d argue The X-Files is better interpreted in the same fashion as religious narratives. The literal events are less important than the spiritual or emotional narrative related through the strange and fantastical events depicted therein.

I think the best two X-Files movies are Brian de Palma’s Blow Out and Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters.

Blow Out

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller movie, heavily coated in the lingering 1970s. John Travolta is a B-movie sound man who witnesses a strange car accident involving a prominent politician. After rescuing the woman who was in the car with the now-dead politician, Travolta’s character becomes a target of the clean-up efforts of a dangerous assassin who may be working for the government.

If you like answers, don’t watch Blow Out. Also, stop watching The X-Files: you’re going to be disappointed. The conspiracy is not uncovered, or even explained in Blow Out. We know that someone made a move on this politician, whose poll numbers threatened the sitting president as a primary approached. We know that they covered it up by making it look like an accident caused by a blow out on a car tire. We know that the assassin who did all this, played with a horrendous icy menace by a distressingly youthful John Lithgow, is going to kill anyone who threatens to reveal his villainous activities. So that’s the conspiracy, the paranoia, and, with the lack of revelations, the stop-making-sense. Where’s the ills of America?

This movie came out before most people I know were born, so I’m going to tell you about the ending. If that prospect distresses you, skip this next paragraph.

De Palma’s direction is what brings it all home during the film’s tremendous climax at the Liberty Bell anniversary celebration on the Philadelphia waterfront. Our hero has unknowingly sent the woman he saved, played beautifully by Nancy Allen as a sweet yet streetwise ingenue-type, into the jaws of the rapacious, garotte-toting Lithgow. Lithgow’s character hauls her up before a vast American flag, and beneath the fireworks kills her, brutally. Travolta’s character arrives moments too late, in time to kill the assassin, but not to save his victim. All around the triumphal celebrations of a nation built on violent victories go on, and those who die to make way for that triumph are snuffed out. All we have left at the end of the movie is the woman’s dying scream, used and abused for a B-movie sound effect while her real self falls away.

Little people get turned to meat to preserve big people’s power. Good thing that doesn’t feel familiar at all.

Dark Waters

Dark Waters is my other premiere X-Files movie. A 2019 based-on-a-true-story thriller, Dark Waters is scarier than the scariest episode of X-Files for the reason of being true. The whole world has actually been tainted by unnatural carbon chains developed by the DuPont Chemical Company. They’re in you and me and every person and animal you know, and they will be lingering here long after we’re all dead.

The paranoid air of the film is so oppressive that a zoom on a teflon-coated frying pan is legitimately terrifying. And the view on the violence and horror of the American project is unflinching. Todd Haynes exerts the full force of his mastery of mise-en-scene to present a chilling set of contrasts between the secure redoubts of wealthy DuPont lawyers and the poor, vulnerable, profoundly poisoned people of West Virginia, whose case is taken up by class traitor lawyer Rob Bilott. Bilott is radicalized when he witnesses the tremendous disgusting toll of DuPont’s experiments on people who have no recourse and no resources. He spends more than a decade fighting for the smallest shred of recognition and restitution for DuPont’s victims. In the end, stress nearly kills him and the settlement he secures is paltry compared to DuPont’s profits and he goes back in to keep fighting. But the real bad guys have already gotten away with it. They always will. They’re rich and this is America.

You might now be wondering: where is the ineffable? Something higher than the literal? Dark Waters is modeled on a real man’s real life. It doesn’t get more literal than that. Nothing makes more sense than that. 

1) FALSE – real life makes the least sense of all. 

2) There is more to real life than the literal. Todd Haynes beautifully deploys the Catholic faith of Rob Bilott and his family throughout Dark Waters to describe and explain Bilott’s resolve to see justice done for the most vulnerable. His commitment to his path, through absolute mortification of the mind and spirit, is what wins the film’s final, perhaps paltry, victories.

But Haynes pushes beyond the spiritual into a kind of deeper well of miracle by featuring, as the viewer discovers during the end credits, the actual victims of DuPont’s poisoning in the film itself. Multiple real figures, including Rob Bilott and members of the families he represented in court, cameo. The most stunning is a man whose congenital facial differences were caused by DuPont experimenting on his pregnant mother, and who plays himself as an adult.

This is where the mysteries of faith and reality intersect in the film. At a moment of absolute despair for Bilott, he stops for gas in West Virginia and encounters a man with a notable facial difference. His unique appearance is immediately recognizable to Bilott, who submitted the man’s baby pictures – part of a secret DuPont file – as evidence of the company’s crimes. In that moment, Bilott is reminded of the urgency and significance of his work – he sees exactly the right person at the right time: the person who is most owed by DuPont. And we see that person, and it is really him. It is a real person whose actual body is a living testament to the blithe villainy of the DuPont Chemical corporation.

Stopped Making Sense

A lot of people think they’re really living in The X-Files because they think that the government is a secret cabal for eating babies. They choose to deal with their beliefs by basically jerking off online all day and night to the idea of government officials getting sent to Gitmo. This is because they misunderstand what both art and religion are for, and consequently have allowed themselves to be possessed by evil QAnon spirits.

The conspiracy in The X-Files doesn’t make sense because it is a device for holding the evils of America, which don’t make sense because there’s no big conspiracy tying the whole thing together. There’s a bunch of smaller conspiracies, piling up inside DuPont Chemical or the CIA or Blackwater, conspiracies that all amount to the same goals: “Get us richer; get them poorer – get us power, no matter the cost.” Those heaving teeming thousands of little sellouts have mortgaged the whole world and everyone on it for just a few billion more dollars.

Mulder can’t solve the conspiracy because the heart of it – his grief over his sister’s disappearance at the hands of the government he and his father serve – is unresolvable. He will be sad forever. The protagonists of Blow Out can’t get to the bottom of the conspiracy because they’re so small and so disposable that they can’t even defend themselves from a man with a cool murder watch. Rob Bilott could see the whole picture of DuPont’s crimes but never get at the real criminals, never punish them in a way that truly mattered.

But he keeps fighting because he’s seen the truth about DuPont’s cruelty.

The only other option is to pretend to have seen nothing at all.

Categories
General Blog Year in Review 2024

The Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part I: Literary

A 1686 woodcut from the book The Strange and Wonderful History of Mother Shipton depicting a person in loose robes hunched and reading
Me, when I'm reading

Where to begin the eternal struggle of man vs. blog? This is not my first attempt at building a regular blogging practice, but perhaps it will be my first successful one. My last blog fell into darkness with the rest of Cohost, but my posts remain preserved. Some may yet be resurrected and expanded for this new crusade. What do I intend to blog about? Whatever I feel like, mainly. But what I feel like is almost always related to gaming, cinema, and genre fiction. What are my qualifications to speak on these subjects? Enthusiasm, education, and most of all a relentless holding of opinions. I will not be silenced.

I’m launching this iteration of bloggage with a multi-part lookback on the most interesting material to cross my desk during 2024 (no requirement to have debuted this year, even though I’m calling this my “Year in Review” in the obnoxious little SEO widget I stupidly added to my WordPress). ‘Tis the season for retrospection, whether or not one’s body of posts from the previous year has survived.

I read decently this year, averaging about 2 books a month. This was my second year recording my reading on Storygraph. I appreciate the motivation provided by the dopamine hit of logging, as well as the ability to opt out of all perverse social media-like engagements on this particular app. In categorizing my literary experiences for 2024, I propose three awards categories: Most Page-to-Page Thrills, Most to Consider, and Best Author.

A colorful pie chart on a black background. The pie chart is split between different moods assigned to books the blogger read in 2024. The biggest section of pie is labelled "Adventurous". Above the chart is text listing that the blogger read 26 books and 9,521 pages in 2024, averaging about 11 days at a time to finish them.
My many literary moods, according to Storygraph

Most Page-to-Page Thrills ironically goes to the two most lengthily brick-like paperbacks I read this year: Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The torment of Storygraph is that every time I think I’ve read a zippily-paced adventure book, I head to the app to log it and discover everyone else in the world rated it SLOW. So too with these. Nonetheless, I found them both lively and engaging genre fiction thrill-rides. Kushiel’s Dart artfully accomplishes the significant task of unifying the genres of fictional autobiography, porno, and alt history fantasy. A Fire Upon the Deep does the same with far-future space opera, medieval-hive-mind-dog succession drama, and mind-bending alt-consciousness dive. The proof is in the soup, as far as I’m concerned. I happily returned to both of these books chapter-after-chapter, day-after-day, ready to discover the next wild torment to befall their hapless heroes. Recommended to anyone who likes a lot of bang (sexual or spaceship-explosive) for their used paperback buck.

A pie chart on a black background. This pie chart is split into three sections. The smallest section is labelled "Fast, 23%". Two much larger sections, equal in size, are labelled "Slow, 38%" and "Medium, 38%".
Storygraph, demonstrating how relentlessly I press the so-called fun out of reading

Most to Consider takes us to the realm of the ideas book, which often hovers on the edge of disappearing into its own ass. But the best ideas books I read in 2024 maintained a delicate, somewhat distanced relationship with their own fundaments. Edward Pangborn’s Davy and Kelly Link’s The Book of Love leverage genre flourishes to ask poignant questions about why we suffer ourselves to live, when it hurts so terribly. The Book of Love, as a highly anticipated 2024 release, has had its share of press, so I won’t belabour my own reaction, but simply say that the deft way with which Link has handled magic and mystery in her short fiction persists in this novel, layered now with a density of viewpoints and feelings that endeavor to capture the emotional life of a whole town (or close to it). The wonder and horror of Link’s otherworld are matched only by the wonder and horror of this one. And the wonder and horror of Davy’s world, though Pangborn’s story is science fictional rather than fantastical. For anyone who has found themselves lamenting the lack of tragic horniness in post-apocalyptic fiction, look no further than Davy. Unjustly forgotten by much of the SF mainstream (except Joachim Boaz, whose glowing review is the one that pointed me Pangborn-ward), the picaresque adventures of Davy through a post-nuclear, quasi-medieval, post-pants New England accrete into more than the sum of their parts. Davy’s life and his account of it return us again and again to the most urgent concerns of our time: what is the legacy our lives of material prosperity will leave? What suffering or succor will remain for future generations in our detritus? Clear-eyed and without cruelty, Pangborn reminds us how we have failed, and will fail again.

Best Author is a no-contest because this is also the author whose work I read the most this year: John M. Ford. I first encountered Ford’s work during an intensive study of the nature of the Klingon in Star Trek, reading his beloved licensed novel and FASA RPG sourcebooks about the Klingons. This material proving shockingly good, I picked up his much-acclaimed alt history fantasy The Dragon Waiting in January and proceeded to have my wig blown clean off. I read The Dragon Waiting twice back-to-back. I read the Draco Concordans website end-to-end. I felt such awe and inspiration and terrible jealousy that I became twice as motivated to work on my own writing. I caught up with How Much for Just the Planet?, Ford’s other Star Trek novel. I fortuitously discovered Ford’s tragically unfinished half-a-masterpiece Aspects in my local used bookstore, and proceeded to lose what remained of my wig. There is so much more to say about Aspects, probably in a whole other entire blog post. For now, all this is to say, John M. Ford was a wonderful writer who was taken from us too soon, and the work from him we do possess is a small but persistent consolation in the wake of that loss. He has left us somewhere to go, even if sadly we have to go without him.

2024, as a year, was rather ass, both for myself and world-historically. But it had its delights and consolations nonetheless. Next time, the cinema, in four categories.