Infonography Rampant

The new status quo

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:03:49 GMT

I will not be moving back to England in the foreseeable future. I enjoy life in the United States of America too much.

Therefore Eleanor and I have split up.

I haven't done a meme in a long time, so...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:26:44 GMT

"Give me a topic -ANY TOPIC- and I will write my thoughts on it. The catch? You have to post this in your journal and I get to pick the topic you write about.

Rules: Whatever the topic is that you write about, you must have at least 10 sentences or 2 paragraphs. Lets have fun. And this is freewriting so I'm not asking you to deliver a masterpiece, just two paragraphs of your thoughts on whatever it is the person request."

My favorite iteration of this appeared in Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, where as part of an interview the protagonist is asked: "What would say is the literary significance of Mr Arky Malarky?" Much wafflage and repositioning of the question ensued, which was of course the point.

My Writing Manifesto

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 03:15:49 GMT

The exact quote eludes me right now, but I believe it was Ray Bradbury who said something like: 'Every person has two million words of bad prose in them. The sooner you get them out on paper, the better.'

Here's my writing manifesto I concocted just over a year ago:

-Iain Banks wrote fifteen novels before he made his first novel sale - once that happened, he edited several he'd already written and managed to sell them this time around.
-C.J. Cherryh wrote twenty novels before her first novel sale.
-Charles Stross has twenty novels that he claims he'll never be able to sell (though he posted one of them on his website and it was pretty good).

I love the novels of Banks and Stross, and though I haven't read any of Cherryh's yet, some of her novelettes are stunning. (Just today I read one of her stories that in her opening paragraph managed to evoke an image of a Picketwire-like city far better than anything I achieved in my entire novel.)

Therefore: I am not going to rely on a single epiphany novel, suddenly conjuring up a sellable work of brilliance from nowhere. I am going to follow the example of these authors and learn to write through brute force.

I intend to write one novel a year, edited to a state where someone else can read it and criticise it. By the time I hit fifteen or twenty novels, sheer practice and experience should overcome many of my deficiencies in writing style or scene structuring. And I don't mind waiting until the fifteenth or twentieth novel; or at least, I don't mind now. After all, I seem to recall the average age of recent Hugo and Nebula winners being their late forties.

My original version of the manifesto was simply to write a novel a year. On that level I've succeeded - to stay on track, my third novel doesn't need to be completed until Sept 2011. But I suspect the proviso that someone needs to read my work is crucial to ensure that I'm actually improving each time, not just cultivating bad habits.

With my new rules, I'm therefore behind. Dustfall, my first novel, has its second draft 75% completed, with probably another 20k of words left. Only once I've finished that will someone finally get to read it. And only after that will I allow myself to work on a second draft of Picketwire.

(Actually, I could tolerate somebody reading Picketwire in this state, but one of its chief failings is that it's a murder mystery where almost none of the clues to the real murderer appear in the novel. Also jarring to the reader would be when the protagonist becomes a Communist revolutionary halfway through. Someone could conceivably read it now, but I'd want to print it out and add post-its to many of the pages detailing all of the things I missed out and which elements (like the rooftop sports) should be ignored. Making sure certain characters don't change their names partway through, especially twice (Topaz to Galena to Tourmaline), would also be an excellent idea.)

Of course, this should in theory all be taking place while I'm doing the same thing with short stories. After all, I like working in such small boundaries and that's the most likely way I'll be able to break into the fiction market. In fact by the end of this month I want to have written and edited two short stories to submit them for anthologies - details are here if you're interested in applying too.

Sure, it'd be fun to be a published author immediately. But just like any hobby or sport, if I want to be good at it, I've got to put in the hours first.

"A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract... Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way it's the Devil who wins."
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

If these keep happening, I should probably call them 'Awesome Revelation Moments' or something

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:32:48 GMT

That's it. I've got it. I might have mentioned that when writing the first draft of Dustfall there was a point around the 20-25k mark where all the character dynamics clicked into place and I realised what the plot was about. In that case I realised that the three main characters represented three different perspectives on a spectrum: one looking at life for the benefit of the individual, one concerned only with the society as a whole, and the lawkeeper figure who's meant to bear both perspectives in mind and determine where to compromise between the two.

I've just had the same sort of epiphany for Picketwire - and coincidentally it's also at a similar mark (21,597, as it happens.) I've been aware that so far my protagonist Mal has been pretty passive with little distinctive identity coming out. I've been finding whenever she speaks to someone the conversations are almost all one-sided in favour of the other person, with her rarely contributing more than encouraging tokens to keep them going.

But now I've seen what this novel is about. I've known for a while that one of the core themes is that this city is on the cusp of an ideological revolution - I usually describe their tech level as 'within a generation they'll have turned steampunk'. Even in my plot outline on the NaNo website I mentioned that the murder mystery that takes place within the story is in one sense incidental to the social changes it kicks off.

Given this setup, and plenty more besides, it's now staggering that I hadn't realised I needed to put the main characters on another spectrum: this time of the status quo. Effectively whether the characters are looking to the past, present or future. And the great thing about it is it makes perfect sense with all sorts of hints I've thrown in so far - for example the Heritagist movement (essentially the same as the Medievalists from the early 19thC - see here) is the past, most of the proletariat are the present, and Mal now becomes a futurist. Which works well, because she's young and student-y and hasn't been comfortable with the adult status quo for long enough to have much emotional attachment to it. (And if the novel ends the way I think it will, it'll have much more of a bittersweet resonance than I'd initially had.)

I wonder if this happens to most authors - that, no matter how much they think about the thematics at the start, halfway through they'll find a way to reinterpret the novel completely and add entirely new thematic levels. That their genre story suddenly becomes more suffused with Meaning and Purpose and all those other good bits that are great to justify why they're spending so much of their free time writing this novel.

"It is as easy to dream up a book as it is difficult to put it on paper."
Balzac (which should be pronounced as it is in The Music Man - distastefully, emphasis on "BALL-sack"

Remembrance Day: Bert Christman

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:16:46 GMT

I toyed with the idea of having poppies delivered in time for today, but was distracted by other things. (Though I know more than a few ex-Brits here or Americans who've previously lived in the UK who also wanted to wear these. I sense a potential business enterprise next year.) Still, I observed the two minutes of silence (albeit timezone-displaced) and I've been thinking about military heroics and sacrifices all day.

This time last year* I highlighted the life and works of William Hope Hodgson, the horror fiction writer whose work I'd read limited amounts of but have intensely enjoyed.

I'm even less qualified to talk about Bert Christman. The full story is here, but here's the concise version from the excellent Comic Book Legends Revealed column. (All authorship and copyright etc. due to Brian Cronin)

Like many of the creators of the Golden Age, Bert Christman's name has become almost unknown. Which is a shame, not only for his creative contributions to comics, but also for the work he did in real life.

Christman is probably best known today as being the co-creator, with Gardner Fox, of the original Sandman in 1939. [The one who wore a fedora and gas mask - he very briefly appeared in Vertigo's Sandman #1 where he claimed inspiration from Morpheus.]

His other claim to fame were the stories he did backing up Superman in Action Comics starring "The Three Aces": "Whistler Will" Saunders, "Gunner" Bill and British "Fog" Fortune.

The three men were initially soldiers of fortune, and Christman actually drew the serial WHILE flying for the Navy! He would presumably send them in while on leave.

With the advent of World War II, the Three Aces went to China to fight against Japan, and so did Christman as well. In 1941, Christman ceased his work on the Three Aces strip, as he was now in China, fighting on behalf of the "American Volunteer Group" of pilots made famous in the films of the time.

Christman was shot down in early 1942, and was wounded in his escape from the plane. However, he recovered and was back in the cockpit by the end of the month.

Tragically, on January 23rd, 1942, Christman was part of a squadron sent to cut off an attack on Rangoon in Burma. Christman was shot down and killed in the battle.

Let us do our best to keep Christman in our minds.

*At which point I must make a correction to last year's piece. I'd previously said that H.P. Lovecraft must have read House on the Borderland, as there are such obvious parallels between the novel and several of Lovecraft's stories. This is incorrect; I remember reading Lovecraft only encountered Hodgson very late on, after he'd written his Cthulhu Mythos material.

Brought to you by a man in a Phantom costume (no, not the purple superhero)

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:07:24 GMT

In just a few hours NaNoWriMo begins. And I think this is the perfect time to share something I heard from the discussions at ReaderCon.

I believe it was Catherynne M. Valente (author of The Orphan's Tales) who heard about the NaNoWriMo in 2000 as a scheme to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. She thought that sounded far too easy, and used it as an excuse to write her first novel, Labyrinth.

She then put her money where her mouth was and wrote it in ten days.

Furthermore, she managed to sell it, though admittedly she had to go through a few more drafts. And it seems to be quite well reviewed.

So yeah. Think of this as a de-motivational anecdote to whet your appetite. And good luck. Juggling writing, work and life is going to be a challenge. On your marks... get set...

"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."
Kurt Vonnegut (from Cat's Cradle)

Whilst waiting for the stewmeat to soften

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:18:22 GMT

Erm...yes. I wasn't expecting my timetable reshuffle to obliterate LJ writing time completely. And since I'm doing NaNoWriMo it's not as if I'll be resuming any time soon. (Though I've been reading writing guides these past few weeks and have harvested quite a few useful or amusing quotes, so I might be posting them.)

In short: yes, am still here, still working and ever busier on extracurricular stuff. Novel research devours time - and since I'm copying down all potentially interesting ideas, it can take up to ten minutes for me to read a single page of my medieval cities tome. (I like the idea that of the six main blueprints of a new London that were drawn up after the 1666 fire, three of them were bog standard grids and another two were (independently derived) near copies of the Paris layout, just with more star-shaped intersections.)

"I thought your book was good. They say everyone has a great book inside him. I look forward to yours."
John Danton (quoting a precocious teenager who'd just read his first manuscript)

3400 stories read as of today, and proof that I've forgotten at least one of them

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:58:25 GMT

One of the hazards of reading short story anthologies, especially 'greatest short stories ever' collections, is that certain stories will appear over and over again. I've run across Shirley Jackson's The Lottery at least three times, and any anthology of nineteenth century horror seems contractually obliged to include Saki's Sredni Vashtar. Both of these are excellent, mind you, and I'm perfectly happy for these to be regularly reprinted and exposed to new audiences.

But it's slowly making me appreciate the quality of anthology editors who don't simply go for the obvious choices in the back catalogue, but who go out of their way to track down obscure gems. I hold up the late Peter Haining as being especially good at this - his comic fantasy anthology The Flying Sorcerers, and particularly The Frankenstein Omnibus, contain good stories that haven't been reprinted at all since their initial appearance in 1890's magazines.

(Of the many books I picked up this weekend, one anthology I'm especially interested in is of SF and fantasy written by authors considered to be thoroughly mainstream. I'm especially intrigued the SF John Steinbeck wrote. Yes, really. I wish I could tell you more about that one, but I can't remember what the anthology was called, and as my newly purchased books are in one big stack taller than me, it would be a precarious job finding out. I've almost had a bookslide once today.)

Anyway, the same stories repeat every so often. And for the first time since I started this project, I've read a story for the second time without realising I'd already read it. This is somewhat embarrassing, since it implies I'm forgetting some of the things I've read completely, somewhat removing the point of reading them in the first place (except, in some cases, to check that their contents were wholly unmemorable). Every other repeated story I've managed to identify from the first few pages, if not the title, but not this one. Actually, I felt a twinge that I'd read this before half-way through, but it was so good I read on anyway.

The offending story is Wilkie Collins' The Adventure of a Terribly Strange Bed. It's about a rich guy in Paris who, bored with gambling in casinos with men who can afford to lose money, decides to go to one of the seedier establishments where the players are truly desperate. And then... I won't go on, suffice to say that it has a good atmosphere, entertaining characters and setup, and is put together with an excellent degree of skill. For something written in the 1850s it's shockingly readable nowadays. And it's only about 10 pages long.

So there we have it. And now I'm off; my housemates and I are just about to hunker down and watch the two hour premiere of House season 6. Having seen the first minute of it, it makes me wonder how much they're willing to change the formula of the series. It's entirely possible the answer is 'quite a lot, at least for the first eight or so episodes', but I'll have to see.

I find it very apropos in this increasingly polarised country

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:20:45 GMT

Excerpt from Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks, all copyright stuff to him, etc. The excerpts only remove descriptive passages of the surroundings that would otherwise be distracting. Very good space opera, incidentally. Not quite a fun read, but a quickly paced one.

"Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit."

"I don't believe in argument," he said [...].

"You don't?" Erens said, genuinely surprised. "Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one."

"It's not cynicism," he said flatly. "I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk."

"Oh well, thank you."

"It's comforting, I suppose." [...] "Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses."

"Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted.

"Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win the argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing."

"So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile... arguing stuff?"

"Agree to disagree," he said. "Or fight."

"Fight?"

He shrugged. "What else is left?"

"Negotiate?"

"Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it's the type of conclusion that I'm talking about."

"Which basically is disagree or fight?"

"If it comes to it."

Amusing enough while it lasted (for me at least)

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:47:02 GMT

The foreseeable future has ended, paradoxically, with some entirely foreseeable events.
The office is now in the second tax season, growing busier as we approach the deadline for the extended returns (of which there are many, perhaps even more than the ones we filed on time).
There are three other housemates living here again, and my regular Saturday bulk meals might make a return.
(After all, if I'm working full day shifts I don't have time to cook in such quantities in the evenings and still get stuff done.)

With this,
with the reintroduction of various groups that went on hiatus over the summer,
with the remains of my neurological experimentation locking out at least two hours each day for writing fiction,
and with the fad for scrutinising the structure of other people's daily blogs receding into the past,
it looks like I'll be lacking both the time to keep up my attempts at daily posting and any psychological need for broadcasting my opinions.

I'll still torment you with posts, but on more of a regularly irregular schedule than before.
(And just as a taster of how irregular this might get, I wrote this four days ago but I've only just remembered I never posted it.)

Code Geass: Yes, I've almost finished rambling about it

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:53:58 GMT

I'm out of pre-plotted essays, and my obsession with Code Geass has slackened after I sated it with several hours' research over the weekend. And my eventual verdict of the series? Yeah, it's pretty good - something to recommend to people who like that sort of thing, but not wholeheartedly.

(Though I have one final point to mention: After the 'Knight of [number]' series were introduced, I am still kicking myself that I didn't predict someone becoming a 'Knight of Zero'. To a lesser extent I feel I should have been able to predict more of the Zero Requiem scheme based on the name, but that's more that I've watched enough anime that I'm used to gratuitous English being thrown about, so I'm surprised when such phrases actually mean something so literal.

And while we're on meaning, I imagine FLEIJA was meant to translate to another mythical name; half the subbed episodes I've got translate it as 'Freya' instead. Which is odd, because Freya/Frejya's the Norse goddess of love and fertility and stuff, and is one of the least threatening characters in the entire pantheon. There's also a chance it's meant to be her twin 'Freyr', but he's still pretty wimpy - in his only starring legend he stupidly gives away his magical sword, an action that guarantees him a quick death at Ragnarok. Neither name seems fitting for a WMD, but maybe the fact that some of the other names have significance is disguising the use of a gratuitous mythological name here.)

Instead, I've found myself something else to be obsessed about. I've just joined another weekly writing group, which is run by someone who's apparently a big fan of steampunk. Though I haven't written anything in that subgenre before, I've set myself a challenge to complete a 1000 word story within the milieu by next Tues. I think I'm trying to cram a ridiculous amount of plot into a story that size, but no matter, it's a writing deadline and they're always great for wringing out extra productivity. Even so, I should probably have planned to write a story that didn't require me to read a complete novel before I'm able to start...

In other news: after a long absence, the house is filled with the pitter-patter of tiny feet. The ferrets and their master have returned! Fuzzies are available on demand again! Huzzah!

Code Geass: On Executive Meddling

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:36:08 GMT

TV/film executives, and to a lesser extent publishing editors, are wonderful scapegoats. As soon as fans hear that the original creator was forced to change his original script by the higher ups, anything they don't like about the finished project can be blamed on the meddling executives.

In many cases this is true to a certain extent. After all, there have to be fans looking out in the first place for accusations of meddling to arise - it happens to amateur scriptwriters even more often, but there's a lot smaller chance you'll ever hear about it. (Demonwarp is a good example. Ever heard of it? Exactly.)

For a creator to have fans looking out for their work, either the creator has done things in the past to get a fanbase, or they're writing about pre-existing characters that already have a fanbase. (A third possibility, that the finished tampered work is still strong enough or a promising enough failure that it gets its own fanbase, is possible but rare; arguably things like Evil Dead and Donnie Darko count, but in those cases the executive meddling was confined to the distribution process.)

Going with the first option, the creator has done previous works that have garnered at least a cult audience. It can therefore be assumed that the creator in his previous work was good or better in one or more aspects; plot, characterisation, visual flair etc. If these qualities are lacking in the finished product and it's known the project was the victim of executive meddling, the fans can blame the executives for screwing up what must have already been working in the first place. (All in frequently doomed attempts to increase the potential audience, of course.)

But there are cases where because it's known executive meddling took place, fans blame the higher ups for everything they don't like about the finished product. Even though the finished product may not be all that different from the creator's intentions.

Babylon 5 is an excellent example of this. Fans know that this was always intended to be a five season series, that the executives cancelled the fifth so JMS (the creator) compressed his plans to tie up all the big story threads by the end of season four, only to be told at the last minute that season five had been uncancelled after all. This left him with no planned story, and is cited as why season five is a lot quieter than the preceding ones and is generally considered not as good.

Except that JMS has said in various places that season five is largely as he planned it to be. After all, his original plan was to end season four with Sheridan having just been captured by Earth forces, and he was always intending to have a quiet slowing down of the series. There's probably half a dozen episodes' worth of change at most. (At least, due to execs - Claudia Christian leaving also changed some of the chairs around.)

Another example appears to be Code Geass (you knew I'd get there eventually). One of the creators said early on that thanks to executive meddling, R2 would be completely different from what he'd originally intended. This led to announcements of 'trainwreck' even before R2 had started airing, and just about all the flaws of the season were subsequently laid at the executives' feet.

The odd thing is, in the creator's interview that kicked off the whole trainwreck thing, he mentioned not one R2 plotline that had been derailed, but two - both with contradictory thematic arcs.

To me it sounds like the executives stepped in and gave their dictates at quite an early stage in the planning process. Furthermore, in a later interview it's mentioned that the series ended as they had always planned it to end.

What constitutes 'end' is unknown in this case, although I suspect the Zero Requiem scheme is probably a bare minimum. So we're left with knowing that the executives meddled with the beginning, the creators did what they planned at the end, and we have no idea where they overlap.

Now. On the one hand, the season got rid of its opening resets that feel most forced (LeLouch back at school, the reintroduction of the United States of Japan and the Special Administrative Zone) within the first eight episodes, so you can argue that when these plot elements were left behind (literally, when they left Japan), the series went back to what the creators were planning all along.

On the other hand, you could argue that after the forced starting structure, the original schemes of an imposter Zero or LeLouch running for government wouldn't work, so they had to come up with brand new stuff to fill the gap before their planned ending.

Until there are more detailed interviews on the subject (or until they get translated) this is all speculative. I'd lean towards the former option; I've looked at quite a few original concepts of stories and seen how they've changed by the final versions, and it's quite impressive to what lengths a creator will go to distort their original concept so they can still fit it into the story.

Then again, I'm biased. I'm quite happy with Geass being explained as just a magical doohickey that few people have, and the little we saw of Geass' background didn't make me eager to learn more about it. (Though it seems the majority of shippers disagree with my opinion of C.C. being a dull character existing largely to stop LeLouch from talking to himself quite so much and to cosplay as Zero when the plot demanded it.)

On similar lines, I was very surprised to learn that Rolo was an executive-demanded character that the creators didn't want to include, because I loved his character arc; it gave LeLouch perhaps his best manipulatively cruel moment and the most believable loyalty change in the series, and his death was similarly cruel and touching. (Ditto Guildford - sacrificing himself to save LeLouch from FLEIJA was wonderfully twisted. And yes, he's dead to me - as far as I'm concerned, that montage of everybody living at the end was one of the surviving character's optimistic daydreams.)

Speaking of original versions, I came across one (completely unsubstantiated) source that said that in the creators' original plan for the series, there weren't any mecha in it at all. Perhaps my speculation of what the series would have been like without mecha was more insightful than I'd realised...

(I wish.)

Code Geass: The Wider Schemes

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:32:46 GMT

I said after I'd just finished watching the first season of Code Geass that I'd had a cursory look at the reviews for R2 and didn't exactly find them complimentary. I therefore prepared myself for mentally writing how I'd have handled R2 as I watched it - I do this with most story-driven things when they aren't occupying my full attention.

I first had my doubts about this scheme a few episodes in, where I found myself liking the plot twists and (some of) the character moments they were throwing in, even if in places it felt like they were hammering the reset button.

I stopped my mental writing eight episodes in, when the series did exactly what I was hoping they'd do. And for the rest of the series they threw in a surprising number of my favourite concepts. Which may explain my more favourable attitude to R2 than R1. (And yes, I know the first season isn't technically called R1, but it's a handy appellation to distinguish the seasons, deeper meanings be damned.)

To elaborate: after R1 I was hoping Zero would at some point leave Japan and turn a foreign country into his base of operations (as well as a place to manufacture all those mini-mecha they blow up each episode). And that's exactly what the did. The 'United States of Japan' was a grand gesture, but taking advantage of pre-existing countries would make for better tactical sense to unite everybody against Britannia.

Zero getting his United Federation of Nations to declare war on Britannia legally was a philosophically elegant blend of LeLouch's 'conquer by force' and Suzaku's 'but do it within the system' ideologies. (Though they never went anywhere with that, it's still a nice idea.)

They also achieved it in the most stylish way possible with the 'one million Zeros' scene. Screw the practical costume considerations, that was awesome. (Well, the dog with the Zero mask was kind of silly.) Usually such a scene has no purpose other than making a gesture (as in the film of V for Vendetta), so the plausible-by-loophole justification was appreciated.

As for some of the other story concepts: I've always been fascinated with the various designs for utopian societies. It's largely the reason why I dabble in sociology, and they crop up in my stories a lot.

The last few episodes of R2 describe three attempts at setting up a utopia. Of these, I've explored both 'fuse humanity back into a single gestalt entity' and 'remove humanity's hatred amongst themselves by focusing it all on one willing individual' at some length, and I've always found the MAD principle fascinating. You can therefore imagine I was quite pleased to see these things rear their heads.

In fact, just having characters battling with their differing versions of utopias is unusual. The typical treatment for a utopia tends to be:

a) The utopia already exists, a badguy makes it stop working, heroes try to put it back together (Demolition Man immediately springs to mind)

b) Someone tries to set up a utopia, it's eventually revealed the plans for the utopia are flawed and the architect becomes the badguy (1984, Gun X Sword, that sort of thing)

c) A combination of the two: utopia exists, badguy wrecks it, in the process of repairing it the hero realises it's not a utopia after all (like Logan's Run)

So either a) there is already a utopia in place and it works, or in b) and c) a utopia is treated as a concept that cannot be attained, just striven for. In all these cases there is just one concept of a utopian society, with the alternative being either conventionally flawed society ("as is how life should be") or outright evil.

A story in which schemes of multiple versions of utopias clash is therefore quite unusual, as far as I can tell. And R2 does reasonably good treatments of them - I'm still trying to figure out whether the 'concentrate hatred onto one individual' is more effective when it's a machine/anonymous entity or a human person. Or if it even works very well once the person is dead. Still, the ideas were raised, and enough beyond a token manner that there's actual merit to comparing the schemes (even if LeLouch's 'past/present/future' categories are a bit strained) within the scope of the series.

Some odds and ends

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:03:40 GMT

- My housemates have found the Rocky Horror photos of myself online. Evidently they have already been acclimatised to my weirdness; rather than be scared, they told me I had to wear it again for Hallowe'en. I won't, since the costume's back in England, not to mention places of it are hemmed by a stapler and tied together with shoelaces. Still, I suppose this means I'll have to come up with something similarly disturbing this year that's not simply a rehash of EP crossdressing.

- Crazy fan theories are one thing, but there are just too many ones about the importance of waffles in the Heroes universe - the sheer volume of the suggestions listed here are starting to make me believe that at least one of them is true...

-And here's an extract from The First Time I Got Paid For It, where a novice writer has been invited to brainstorm with Alex Haley, a very successful scriptwriter:
"During this discussion I saw an unusual art object on the wall. A nickel, a dime and three pennies were backed against black velvet and ensconced in a Plexiglass container. When I asked Alex about this, he smiled and declared it was what he had in his pocket the day he discovered Roots [his first script] was being published. 18 cents! He further explained he'd only had wilting lettuce, two catsup packets, and a half-empty jar of Miracle Whip in his refrigerator. His plan was to have a salad with french dressing for dinner that very night..."

- In doing my background reading for the slashfics, I've been reminded of Rule 63: "For any given male character, someone has created a female version of that character (and vice versa)." This is quite a fun rule for those too jaded for Rule 34 to disturb them anymore. I also realised that if I switched all the genders in my novel, it'd be a lot less palatable to read. (Which might be a good reason for doing it, I suppose.)

Actually, what with temporarily retuning my writing to slashfic sensibilities, I'm half-tempted to put in a couple of ambiguous lines in my novel to give fodder for shipping Cass/Ty FTW...

Code Geass: On Writing Overly Intelligent Characters

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:48:30 GMT

First, I tried to review Code Geass R2 normally. Then I tried to be less critical and only put my thoughts down. Then I tried to simply make a list of stuff I liked and didn't like. Even this grew far too rambling. If all goes to plan, I'll serialise some of my opinions in chunks a bit closer to bite-size. You can assume that all of these posts are spoiler-free (assuming you know the premise, up to the first episode of R1), except for the bits hidden by cuts or in white text. If there's a paragraph with parts of lines missing, that's why. Either that, or I grew bored and started putting in useless spaces masquerading as spoilers.

In the introduction to his early novel Protector, Larry Niven mentioned that the earliest draft had been much more from the super-intelligent alien's point of view, but he couldn't do the alien's intellect justice. This is a common problem in SF when dealing with vastly smarter beings or entities, even if you're only writing dialogue for them. (From a past review: "Clue: when writing cosmic entities' dialogue, avoid contractions.")

Master tacticians are also difficult to pull off. Their schemes might be presented as so simple that the other side really should have thought of that as well; rather than presenting the schemer as a mastermind, it simply makes their opponents seem like gormless idiots. Conversely the schemes can be so complex and require multiple levels of 'You think you've already figured out what I'm thinking, so I'll do this instead', your suspension of disbelief snaps and you conclude that the schemer must be a precog to have any chance to pulling these schemes off. A good example of this is the ending of Death Note.

In comparison, military tacticians tend to be easier to write, since the author just needs to find the troop movements of a suitably decisive battle and basically recreate it. It assumes the enemy generals are idiots for having forgotten this from their training, but as the vast majority of the audience won't recognise it either, this is a fair fudge. The enemy generals may still be seen as incompetent for having fallen into the trap, but no more so than the real-life ones.

(Even so, there are certain battles that everyone wants to refight. In fact, many generals of the past two millennia have tried to reenact the Battle of Cannae, in which the Carthaginians were greatly outnumbered by eight full Roman legions yet managed to annihilate them with minimal casaulties. They effectively used a type of pincer movement. This is very popular even today; in the last few weeks I've seen it in King Solomon's Mines, and LeLouch tries something similar in China.)

Against these scripting challenges, LeLouch's reputation as a master strategist doesn't fare too badly.* Granted, by R2 the overwhelming importance of the individual and increasingly magical mecha mean directly stealing tactics from history is all but impossible. Even so, there are a few neat examples, two in particular that make good use of the local terrain:

LeLouch getting the Black Knights' submarine to destroy the enemy fleet above it. I love this. There are a number of methane clathrate fields situated on continental shelves, and it's been experimentally shown that these can release bubble which decrease the density of the water above, so making any ship above sink. So it's an excellent use of a real-life phenomenon (albeit one not observed in the field, as far as I know), enough that I'm willing to ignore the fact that submersibles shouldn't be affected that much and they certainly wouldn't explode on contact.

(Actually, this reminds me of another point. In any anime fight, whether in person or by mecha, it's pretty much inevitable that the badguy will say half-way through, "You leave me no choice but to use this," or "Nobody has ever survived when I use this," and reveal an ability, transformation or gadget that suddenly makes them a lot more powerful. Although sometimes this new power has undesirable side effects, plenty of times you're left wondering why the badguy doesn't simply use that attack all the time.

LeLouch says one of these lines just before detonating the remaining sakuradite beneath Mt Fuji. This seems more appropriate than most, given that its existence has been well foreshadowed, it fits with LeLouch's character, and tells more about his current state of desperation than any number of those close-ups of his shaky bulging eyes.)

The other... I won't try to explain it fully (partly because I've only just noticed how long this is already), but it's when they're in China and Xing-ke is leading the Chinese army against them. LeLouch has planned for this eventuality and has customised his battlefield beforehand, even draining a nearby aqueduct so the water can't be used against them. Except Xing-ke knows things about the quality of the land that LeLouch couldn't have known from merely looking at maps, that only someone who's been there would know...Though contrived, it's plausible, it sells both of them as master tacticians, and that automatically lifts up a battle that is otherwise largely fighty fighty fighty. It's probably the only time the series got me to like Xing-ke, but that's for a later post...

*When he's not making impossible chess moves, that is...

Review: Julie & Julia

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:08:21 GMT

I'm not sure if Julie & Julia's made it to UK cinemas yet, but no matter. It's... well, you couldn't call it a chick flick, but I still felt like I was docking my manhood at the entrance. In some ways this is a film version of a cookery show with a smidgen of plot.

Its tagline is 'Based on two true stories'. The first of these is the life of Julia Child, who wrote a cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which first presented French recipes to the American public in an easy-to-follow manner. Apparently it's own of the most important American cookbooks ever written. Meryl Streep stars, and once again she's captivatingly brilliant in the role.

The other story is that of Julie Powell, a 30-something stuck in a dead-end job and bored with her life until she hits upon the idea of cooking all 524 recipe in Julia Child's book in one year. She records it all on her blog, she goes through trials of burning things and spells of disillusionment but pulls through in the end, yadda yadda yadda. (You might be able to tell which story I found more interesting.)

I suppose the film could be called a romantic comedy, except the romance is more directed towards the love of cooking than anything else. Well, both protagonists have husbands on-screen with them much of the time, but they're so impossibly saintly there's not much of a story there. For the mood, yes, foils for the gentle comedy aspects and supports for the love-of-food aspects, but no lasting story beyond that.

I suppose it's telling that when we left the cinema, my relatives all said how much they enjoyed it. After about an hour, when we started to mull over what we'd seen, we found more and more places in the film that turned out to the pointless, or aspects we wished they'd explored further, or bits that didn't hold together once you broke beyond the feel-good sheen.

But I don't deny it's light fun while it lasts, and if you're into cooking in any way it's a pleasing way to spend two hours. You're there for the transient pleasure of watching it, don't treat it as anything more and you'll be happy.

Why LeLouch wears that helmet as much as possible

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:37:00 GMT

Back to the grindstone, except now it's moving faster than it has been for a good few months. Less free time, but a better chance of ending the month in the black. I also needed to go shopping and cook something in industrial quantities this evening, which yielded a mildly experimental chili con carne. The cayenne peppers, whilst not delivering the thermonuclear punch I was hoping, still have a nice little delayed kick to them.

Since I skimmed over several recipes before starting (as opposed to using Widget's version, which I usually stick to), I added a few unusual ingredients, including a few shots of bourbon. This works quite well, and I like to think of it as the manlier version of cooking wine. (Using spirits also makes the 'one for me, one for you' style of cooking with wine somewhat more hazardous.)

These, combined with a growing obsession to find out as much as possible about what the original plans for Code Geass R2 were, have left me with little time this evening, so I'll simply leave you with neko-ears LeLouch...

My skin is now covered with weird stripes of sunburn, but well worth it

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:12:44 GMT

And to think, now I'm back in Philly, but five and a half hours ago I was in the Atlantic Ocean. Granted, it was incredibly windy, so you had to keep actively walking (swimming would get you nowhere) against the tide to avoid being swept away. So not quite as fun as previous days.

I spent a few days with my immediate family, which went by all too quickly, and with my American relatives, which was probably a day or two longer than ideal. (Exacerbated by having seen the latter group last weekend too.) One of my relatives has become hugely polarised towards the rights of the individual, claims that anything governments try to do is inherently wrong/evil, and attacks any remotely socialist institution. He also likes to provoke what he must think are discussions, but which quickly turn into arguments, and wielding a sledgehammer-like insistence that his view is right. Frankly, it's good to be away from that.

On a lighter note, my sister and I discussed for a good hour or so the merits of certain slashfic pairings, and she's now given me a shopping list of ships she wants me to write (ones she thinks are promising but has rarely seen done well). Discarding the ones for shows I haven't seen or don't remember well enough (just about all I remember of Descendants of Darkness is that the cast were all bishies), I can see promising spins on Ed/Roy and Fred/George/Lupin. She's also told me that the main website I get slash from is regarded as one of the worst collections out there, which considering the general quality (very much of the 'insert tab A into slot B' style of writing) didn't come as a complete surprise.

My pseudo-uncle, when we were out on a 'cocktail cruise' on his sailboat:
"The challenge is to drink as much as possible and still be able to tie her up at the end of it."
Granted, he was talking about his boat, but he's not the sort of person to make that kind of innuendo deliberately, so...yay?

Good old BA, not charging for a second suitcase or carry-on

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:57:27 GMT

My mother and less childish sister are using me as an excuse to fly out to Philly for a week. When asked if there was anything I wanted them to bring, I could only think of two things:

1) A box of treasury tags. Seriously, these things simply don't exist in this country. I don't use them very often, but when I need them I find little else can really take their place. My only foreseeable use would be to bind manuscripts, but I'm sure other uses will toddle along.

2) Two of the largest books I own. (Well, excluding a few oversized artbooks.) One of them's a nice thick hardback, Building Jerusalem (which I raved about two years ago here), and the other's London: A Biography, a 900 page colossus I read last year, which I don't think I raved about but could easily have done so. These two probably filled up whatever leftover space was in their bags.

And why? Because these are excellent reference books for how London has worked through the ages. I did some superficial culling of useful facts when I first read them, but now that I'm gradually gearing up to build my city of PicketWire, I'll be wanting more detail than my meagre notes hold.

Yes, yet more books. I've basically given up on the idea of restraining my collection, now that I own enough I want to keep that I'll need to use a shipping contained to get them back to England eventually. At this stage I can still claim that I'll have read most of the books I own by Christmas. Unfortunately I've discovered that one of my author friends is really rather good - I've been devouring three of his essays a day since I picked up his collections.

Said author also deals in second-hand books. Now, I'm starting to become quite fond of L. Sprague de Camp, a Golden Age SF author who I've tentatively added to my 'is always worth a look' list (T.C. Boyle, Thomas Ligotti and Robert Silverberg being my latest such additions). Unfortunately I've discovered that the book dealer has almost a complete set of de Camp's works, and furthermore the copies that de Camp owned himself. The temptation to procure these books with such a totemic connection to their author is growing irresistible.

Anyway, family's here, so I probably won't be back until next Wed. Unless I really need a means of escape.

Plan 9, Episode 29, Word Count 52640 (and more to come this evening)

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:42:25 GMT

Last week's Rifftrax mumblings (before they were hijacked) were originally written to lead up to when I saw a very special screening of Plan 9 From Outer Space at a nearby multiplex. This was being broadcast to over a hundred cinemas across the country at the same time for one night only. The film's sound was being transmitted from a single location, where three of the main Rifftrax guys were there to give their commentary live.

(Cinema staff being incompetent, this meant they didn't manage to connect the sound up properly for the first five minutes, causing much initial chanting of "Refund!" Fortunately we only missed the first half of a short, a Fifties training video for airline stewardesses. With their fully flat beds partitioned by curtains along the line of sleeper trains, it's arguable that the introduction of fully flat seats in First Class were merely returning to the original model of passenger flight.)

It also gave me another chance to reappraise Plan 9. I'd previously only seen it once at Bath, where I found enormous difficulty in interpreting it as a film at all. It just felt like a random assortment of scenes unrelated to each other, footage of people wandering around in woods, and scenes of people 'acting' in front of curtain backdrops that looked more like something out of a children's play.

Seeing it again, I was definitely wrong. It's clearly story-shaped, and furthermore a story that Ed Wood must have thought was imparting a serious message (essentially the same as The Day the Earth Stood Still, except that in this one the aliens get blown up and the fact that humanity will obliviously blow up the entire universe is cheerfully ignored). It's now one of the most hilariously bad films I've ever seen. I'd still choose Robot Monster over this, though it's now a very close call.

In other news: I think I might have been reading a few too many nineteenth century correspondence letters recently. My family might be surprised when my next weekly letter home turns up stuffed with archaisms. In fact, count yourselves lucky this post isn't ending with "Yours etc." or similar unnecessaries.

(This point is prompted by reading H.P. Lovecraft's biography. It's riveting stuff, but I've decided that in the future I should stay away from biographies about authors with questionable mental states. Too much temptation for compare-and-contrast, and they might give me ideas.)

Speaking of which, everyone remember the aliens in Indiana Jones 4 coming from "Not space, but the spaces between spaces"? Here's a segment from The Dunwich Horror:

"...The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them." (Emphasis in the original.)

And on the writing front, the main character's just spoken a few lines in a "violently polite voice". I'm curious what that actually sounds like (or whether it's just overwritten).

Preventing further unexplained absences

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:15:30 GMT

City too hot. Off to beach. Back Monday.

"Real subtle product placement there, America."
Rifftrax commentary as the camera pans over a fluttering American flag

Rifftrax, turning into a rant about the Daredevil film

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:16:40 GMT

MST3K has been a bit of a disappointment. I've watched half of season 0 and dabbled in season 1, and their lacklustre commentary hasn't acted as much of an inducement to make time for more. The fact that I'm not part of the scifi committee anymore, and that I therefore don't feel I need to become as broadly knowledgeable about SF and horror films as possible, has also surprisingly revealed that much of the time I'd prefer to read a book instead.

Anyway, MST3K has turned into its modern incarnation Rifftrax. Rather than having to buy the rights for films they show, with Rifftrax they simply record an alternate commentary track, and leave it up to you to synch it with your own copy of the film. This means, unlike before, they're free to mock anything, especially recent blockbusters.

This has turned out to be a good way to dodge the voice in my head saying, "Why do you want to waste two hours of your life seeing something you've already seen before when you could finally get around to whittling down the list of films you haven't seen already?" I am now able to answer, "Because sometimes after a successful four hour writing binge, I want something stuffed with soulless CGI and unfathomable scripting to sneer at. And if I have extra jokes and snide remarks filling the gaps between dialogue, it's like I'm watching a different film. Honest."

So far I've been using it to revisit films I initially thought were good, but haven't seen in a while and in the meantime multiple critics have panned them. And the critics have largely been right. T3 really is little more than a carbon copy of T2 with less believable plotting and hollower action sequences. And since the series is fraught with time travel paradoxes, it seems appropriate that the human characters' motivations are paradoxically nonsensical, varying wildly from scene to scene.

As for Daredevil, I don't know what I was thinking. Daredevil himself is a joke. His lawyer abilities seem to extend to little more than, "Did you commit this crime?" "No." "...Dammit." His blind man routine contains so many sight-requiring gags, even before his duel in the park, that it makes anyone who thinks he's blind an idiot. Now he could have gotten away with this if the film as a whole was in a lighter vein, but with the rest of the film trying so hard to be 'angsty and brooding superhero' with vague pretensions of noir, it felt completely incongruous.

In fact, a lot of it felt like multiple scripts had been meshed together. There was the initial attempt to paint him as a lethal vigilante*, Punisher-style, but aside from a few out of place "I'm not the bad guy" protestations, the 'hero as cold blooded murderer' was ignored. I suppose his sudden love with Elektra takes as long to blossom as many movie romances, but I'm still taking marks off.** And then there's the ludicrous cane-turns-into-billy-club, and trying to portray him as a dark and brooding figure whilst clad in the shiniest red mirth-inducing spandex they could find...

...There was going to be a point, but I'll leave that for another time. (Evidently I should only try running across the city if I can submerge myself in a bath of ice cubes afterwards. I'm getting tired of this 'high ambient temperature' thing. Maybe I should go live in Seattle after all.)

*Which is really weird, as it's pretty much an inversion of what he'd do in the comics. Under most writers he's not a superhero who hunts down criminals who can't be legally prosecuted. Rather, he's someone who catches criminals as a superhero, then makes sure they get fair trials (frequently acting as their own DAs) as a lawyer. It's a dynamic no other superhero has, and when you're doing adaptations like this I'd have thought you'd want to capitalise on what makes the character unique.

On the other hand, Frank Miller's run on Daredevil is a classic, where he made the character's life unrelentingly miserable, and therefore a lot of writers since have decided to return to the theme of 'put Matt Murdock's personal life through the wringer', no matter that it's long-term damaging for the character at best and downright sadistic at worst.

**Speaking of Elektra, I felt thoroughly insulted by the ad campaign for the Daredevil DVD that appeared in most Marvel comics around that time. It simply had a photo of her cleavage and the tagline "Buy the DVD and STARE ALL YOU WANT!" Ye gods...

Review: Doctor Who Audio #35: ...ish

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:51:47 GMT

Starring the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and Peri.

Yes, the title really is "...ish." You can tell from the title it's going to be odd. Even with that warning, it's still one of the least conventional adventures so far, and one who's best medium is definitely as an audio alone. There isn't a rubber-suited monster (in fact no physical monster at all), there isn't any (real or threatened) physical conflict between any characters, and the cast is really only five members large. In fact, it's almost all just talking.

Given these limitations, it's incredible that the resulting story is still very entertaining. As for the plot, the Doctor and Peri arrive at the opening release of the Lexicon, the far-future dictionary compiling every English word ever used and every definition... and then I'm not entirely sure what's going on. There's a supposed suicide by one of the five, all the extras outside of the main five lose their language skills and can only say, "Ish," there's stuff about the ultimate word, and meaning, and the rapacity of the English language... I have a feeling if I tried to make sense of the wider plot, it'd all fall apart.

But that's not really the point. In a way it's not about what's ultimately being said, it's how they said it. When properly scripted Colin Baker is easily the most deliciously loquacious Doctor, his arrogant pretensions of grandeur (and subsequent deflatings by his companions) are a joy to listen to when we aren't being distracted by his onscreen coat-of-many-eyewatering-colours.

The script gives Colin Baker plenty of juciy and playfully sesquepedalian lines, and he handles them all with aplomb. Peri also happens to be an especially good match for him. In an adventure when the Doctor's over the top, classical-reference-stuffed dialogue is emphasised, the more obvious companion would be someone less literate, someone who dismisses his vocal meanderings as a waste of hot air.

This adventure takes a less obvious tack. Peri's always been the Sixth Doctor's equal argumentatively; by playing up her botanist background (almost never seen), she's also portrayed as something of an equal to the Doctor intellectually. She's represented as sufficiently similar to the Doctor in many ways that their differences become more pronounced, which can be a lot more effective than a complete contrast between two characters. In this case it's her American accent and language that drives the Doctor crazy, declaiming she's butchering English, whilst providing her with a good way of keeping her dialogue intelligent yet different. It even becomes a plot point at the end.

In summary: good fun.

Eclipses in Adventure / Lost World fiction

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:06:14 GMT

There's a popular scene in adventure stories where the heroes have been captured by a tribe of primitives. The heroes know that an eclipse is immanent, so they pretend that they have magical powers and are causing the eclipse to happen. (This frequently results in their executions being stopped, their being treated as gods, or both.)

I first encountered this scene in the Tintin story Prisoners of the Sun, and less than a year later in one of Enid Blyton's more obscure books - The Secret Mountain or somesuch (a series of books with 'Secret' in every title, completely unrelated to the Secret Seven mysteries). Ever since, I've wondered which piece of source material these stories were all borrowing the same scene from. For a while I thought the earliest iteration might be in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

TV Tropes suggested it, and my learned book group discussion all but confirmed it: the trope-maker here is King Solomon's Mines, the 1885 novel by H. Rider Haggard that single-handedly invented the Lost World genre. The structure and ideas in this book have been copied over and over again, with this and She providing the Lost World template to hundreds, if not thousands of subsequent stories*.

Surprisingly enough, the version of the eclipse scene in King Solomon's Mines is quite unusual amongst its copycats in that the eclipse is a lunar one.** Almost all subsequent versions of the scene make use of a solar eclipse, frequently making the natives sun-worshippers for extra psychological effect.

But how do the heroes know the eclipse is going to occur? As it happens, Allan Quatermain was carrying an almanac, and it's quite plausible upcoming eclipses would be listed. (Slightly less plausible is why he didn't discard it with the other non-essentials when they were stuck in the middle of the desert with fast-diminishing water.)

The other iterations of this scene tend to be a lot more credulity-stretching. Tintin happened to have some shreds of newpaper on him (I forget why) that happen to mention the eclipse - as one online reviewer said, "Good thing they didn't give him the sports section." I believe the Enid Blyton children just happened to remember a news report about it before they left for the expedition. Most implausibly of all, Mark Twain's 19th Century factory foreman just happened to know that there'd be an eclipse in the next few days. That took place in England in the year 528. Slightly beyond the purview of 'coincidences to drive the plot forward', in my opinion.

As far as I can tell, King Solomon's Mines is the first notable place where this eclipse scene appeared in fiction. But I was shocked to find it actually happened, and to Christopher Columbus no less. (Which means every good American schoolchild knows this. If I'd only thought to ask my mother about this, I might have had this query answered many years ago.) Columbus was in Jamaica, the natives were getting unruly and unconvinced that these white people really were gods, and he happened to have the appropriate astronomical data that allowed him to predict it and threaten to destroy the moon beforehand.

So there we go. If you want more, TV Tropes has a few more examples and subversions. My favourite of the latter is from a Donald Duck comic: having looked up when the next eclipse will be, someone says, "You have two options: get them to pack up camp and move to Madagascar, or stay here and convince them to delay the execution for 237 years."

*I'm not qualified to talk about Lost World fiction much, but I've looked into the nowadays-forgotten-it-even-existed jungle genre of films from the Thirties and Forties, and they're almost all just carbon copies of either King Solomon's Mines or She, plus as much stock footage as they think they can get away with (2/3 of the running time in the case of Jungle Hell, but I digress).

**In the revised edition of the novel he produced a few years after initial publication. Originally it was a solar eclipse, but there were even more astronomical problems with that (among them, that a solar eclipse can't occur just before a full moon). There are still a few inaccuracies with the scene, and there's now the problem that lunar eclipses are more common, happening roughly every three years in a region. Which is something the local wise woman picks up on, but everybody else ignores.

Mecha, Code Geass, and what the latter might be like without the former

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:35:14 GMT

Hmm. Well, chalk that up to a partially successful experiment. It worked, in that I managed to get a considerable chunk of writing done - a good deal more than I'd managed in my sabbatical (and unlike my sabbatical stuff it wasn't just rewrites, it was almost all new).

However it only worked until various family-related things cropped up to disrupt my schedule. As my free time will be similarly intermittent for the next few weeks, I've ended my revision-like mental state (as well as the other not-inconsiderable number of neurological tricks I deployed) to restore normality. As my reading schedule was one of the things practically jettisoned, I've been reminding myself that my standards of normality are rather good. (Well, as good as 'in another continent from newborn puppies and Widget' gets.)

I last mentioned I was entertaining the notion of a novelette about mecha. After a couple of days analysing the themes and tropes of the subgenre, I came out with an outline for how such a story would work that I'd find interesting to write. I also found the story would work much better if I got rid of the mecha. Sigh.

In fact, I mentioned I'd be taking my inspiration from anime series, but it seems like the one I'd be most borrowing from is the End of Evangelion. Specifically the second half with its very odd ideas about humans. Not that I'm using those ideas - oh no, I can come up with plenty of crazy ideas about humans on my own! In fact, the story would be more of a deconstruction of the relentlessly determined protagonist who never gives up, the sort who's pretty much mandatory in any action fiction or shoenen series.

However, this whole enterprise did at least provide me with the impetus to watch the first season of Code Geass. And I'd like to tell you what I thought of the show, except I can't, not properly. It's not complete. The season ends with an ending that willfully doesn't resolve anything. It just ends.

It's the sort of ending of an episode you should only be able to do in the middle of a series, knowing that the viewer is going to see the following episode next week. But there are far too many storylines raised in the last episode and not completed for the viewer to remember them six months later.

In effect, it's telling you: "Thanks for spending your time watching the first season. However we didn't mention this isn't a complete product. If you want any sort of resolution to any of the storylines, you'll have to watch the second season as well." No. It's the TV equivalent of the Marvel comics big summer crossover ending by tying into the following year's summer crossover.

And the only real resolution of the episode? LeLouch reveals himself to Suzaku. Finally. And even that rang false, Suzaku calmly saying "I suspected you but didn't want to believe it" and Kallen going into a Heroic Blue Screen of Death at the news. It feels like these two characters got their scripts muddled up. After all, for the first few episodes Kallen suspected LeLouch was Zero - confirming her original suspicions shouldn't have been as remotely shocking. And Suzaku... that sort of knowing reaction can only work if it feels retroactively plausible. Here, it didn't.

In fact, I though the last few episodes were a bit of a slide. Euphemia's establishment of a new state was the last good idea, a nice way to throw Zero off balance and suggest that Suzaku's 'change from within' is the better tactic after all. But Zero using the Geass on Euphie was laughably contrived, and it all degenerated into the dull sort of fighty-fighty-fighty.

Despite all that, it's a pretty good series occasionally flirting with the extremely good. I suppose I should have been expecting that the success of Death Note would bring in a wave of more 'practically villainous scheming protagonists', but this was a pretty good incarnation (helped considerably by the sheer coolness of his Zero outfit). That the Geass works the way it does, and not just as a more conventional and fuzzy-ruled mind control, is nice as well. I wonder if Garth Ennis' Preacher has made it over to Japan.

In fact, it makes me wonder whether the series would be better without any mecha at all. In a real-world setting (possibly alternate post-WW2 where atomic bomb didn't work, USA was forced to invade Japan manually and is still occupying presence), where there'd be a lot more face-to-face contact and Zero holds the only supernatural ability... I dunno. Maybe I don't find the the mecha themselves inherently interesting after all. Which would be a nice sweeping statement to clarify, except that I find Gurren Lagann awesome...

Edit: I've just had a quick look online and it seems like season 2 of Code Geass is pretty heavily panned. Oh joy.