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A to Z: XYZZY

Wow, we’re almost done with this whole thing. Pretty cool! It’s been fun thus far, and I look forward to next year’s edition. I’ve only missed one prescribed day thus far, which was yesterday, but as the Challenge does not include Saturdays, I can catch up right here and then finish up with Y and Z tomorrow and Monday. As for X, let’s talk about magic words, of which XYZZY is one!

XYZZY? What’s that, you may ask? Well, many moons ago, fantasy adventure games on computers had no graphics, so everything was done via text. (Insert voice of Peter Falk as the Grandpa in The Princess Bride here: “When I was your age, TV was called ‘books’.”) The computer would give you a textural description of where you were, what you could see, hear, and smell, what you could pick up, what directions you could go, and so on. And then you would tell the computer what you wanted to do. These were called “text adventures” back then, although as time went on they would come to be known as “interactive fiction”. There were quite a few of these games around in the 1980s, and to this day, there’s a small but active subculture still producing these with vigor. I haven’t played one in years, but I lost a lot of time as a kid doing so.

The great classic of the genre is probably Zork!, but the original, the one that started it all, was a game called Colossal Cave (or just plain Adventure on some systems). This game started you outside a little house in a forest. As you explored, you’d find an empty stream bed. You’d follow the empty stream bed, to a steel grate that was locked. After figuring out how to open the steel grate, you would enter the Cave via the grate. And thus the tale begins, in which you explore Colossal Cave to find things like canaries in cages; a magical rod; treasures like rubies and golden eggs, the goose that laid the golden eggs; a snake barring your way; a dragon barring your way someplace else; a bridge blocked by a troll who demanded payment for passage; and if you weren’t careful, a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. The object of the game was to recover treasures from the Cave and bring them back to the little house. However, there were puzzles galore here: Some treasures couldn’t be easily transported. Others had puzzles of their own, like how to get to them. And that troll…you had to pay him a treasure in order to pass the bridge, but if you do that, he keeps the treasure…and you can’t win the game unless you return all the treasures to the little house. What do you do? Hmmmm!!! (To this day, I remember the feeling of triumph that came over me when I solved that particular puzzle. That, and the one about getting past the Dragon.)

But anyway, getting back to the original topic here, there are special locations within the cave, from which you can teleport yourself back to the little house, through use of a magic word, and one of these magic words was XYZZY. This served as a way to escape danger quickly (the few villains wandering the cave can’t follow you to the little house), and as a shortcut so you didn’t always have to type out all the directions back to the little house from the cave entrance; just get back to one of the magic-word enabled locations, say the word for that location, and poof!, you’re there. Drop the treasure in the house and then go back and keep exploring.

Colossal Cave was, to a certain degree, a grab-bag of tropes from classic fantasies, adventure stories, and fairy tales. There were allusions to The Lord of the Rings, as well as things like Jack and the Beanstalk. Magic words fit right into this, as magic words abound in fantasy. They are a very old staple of the genre, all the way back to the Arabian Nights (which I really need to blog about, having read a selection of its stories recently), and the “Open Sesame!” of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”. The idea of magic words is very, very old, and in fact, it has in some ways become so much a part of the greater notion of magic that a lot of times, magic words aren’t described as such at all. They become, in the parlance of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the ‘verbal component’ of a spell: the mystical-sounding mumbo-jumbo that a wizard must utter in order to get off a fireball or magic missile.

These kinds of magic words are an extremely important component of the magic system of the Harry Potter books. Over the course of the stories we come to know a good deal of the spells that the wizards in that world use, mainly by way of the words used to cast them. We learn that proper pronunciation is very important (“It’s Levi-O-sa, not Lev-i-o-SA!”), and through these words, we’re able to tell what the various wizards are up to, merely by the words they use. One of the key flaws, I think, in the last of the Potter films is that the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort is dialogue free, including their final spells against one another; in the books, Harry explains to Voldemort precisely why he’s about to lose the battle, and Voldemort tries anyway, while in the movie, Harry doesn’t explain what’s happened until afterwards. And there’s a real sense of fittingness in the book, when Harry is able to ultimately defeat Voldemort with Expeliarmus, which he learned way back in the second book.

The Lord of the Rings has its share of magic words and incantations. The most notable is probably when the Fellowship is trying to enter Moria via the secret door, and Gandalf tries every magic word he can think of to get the doors open. But it turns out that the Dwarves enchanted the door to open with only one word, and they inscribed the word itself right on the door, but in such a way as to make you not realize that was the word at all. The magic-words thing is more inconsistently handled in the movies; Gandalf and Saruman’s battle in Orthanc is incantation-free, but they both shout incantations into the sky while the Fellowship is trying to climb over Caradhras. And when Arwen crosses the river with Frodo and the Nazgul are threatening to follow, Arwen begins uttering words in Elvish, and you know that, well, “shit’s about to go down”. But when Gandalf returns as Gandalf the White, he uses magic without any incantation whatsoever. I don’t know that JRRT ever had in mind any kind of rigid ‘magic system’, complete with rules for magic use, that all the “How to Write Fantasy Books” articles and books say that you need to have.

In Star Wars, however, there is no hint of magic words, no incantations needed to invoke the Force, at all. For a story that is as steeped in the tropes and traditions of mythology as Star Wars is, this fascinates me. The Force has no ‘verbal component’ at all, so far as I can see.

So, what magic words have I forgotten or omitted for reasons of space, and what favorite magic words of yours are there?

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A to Z: Women

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Women. No, not like that. Well, OK, maybe a little like that. Sometimes. But not always. And only about the one I married–look, can we get on the topic at hand here? OK? OK.

But seriously…I’ve been thinking about women as characters in fiction. This has been brought on by a number of things, such as some online discussions I’ve read, but a bigger factor has been reading George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and by far the biggest factor was writing Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), in which each of my three main characters is a female of differing age: one is a full-grown woman, one is a teenager, and one is an eight-year-old girl.

Why did I choose three females? In the case of the two young ladies, I wanted a pair of leads, but I didn’t want to do the brother-sister thing, because that’s been done a lot. The older woman came along later; she was actually a character who was intended to play a small role, near the beginning of the book, mainly to facilitate some exposition, but as often seems to happen with characters of mine, this one decided to stick around. For, like, the whole book. But hey, that’s OK. She’s pretty cool.

I liked the dynamic of these three characters, but it was at times a struggle for me to write them in a way that I felt somewhat convincing as women, and I think that’s because I’m a man. I didn’t want to write three men in the bodies of women. Did I succeed? Well, I don’t know yet. I hope so, though.

(And no, I didn’t take Melvin Udall’s advice on writing women.)

What I really, really, really wanted to avoid was writing women as passive creatures, people to whom things happen, and people on whose behalf others act. I didn’t want a bunch of rescue sequences, featuring strong male characters coming to the rescue of a damsel or two in distress. Nor did I want super-powered heroines who were super-active. I just wanted real people. (Who are Princesses. In space. Reality’s a tough nut to crack, sometimes.)

I’ve mentioned, in my posts on George RR Martin’s books, that I’m troubled by the depiction of the female characters in his universe. Some are active, some are passive…but all struggle mightily against a world dominated by men, a world in which men will tell spirited women, “What you need is a good raping.” I recently read this article that takes Martin strongly to task for his depiction of women:

WHERE WILL YOU END UP IN MYSTICAL DRAGON LAND? If you are an unmarried woman, it is 100% certain that you will be raped or experience attempted rape (4/6: Arya, Sansa, Daenerys, Brienne). If you are married or engaged, there is a 75% chance that your husband or fiancee will beat or sexually assault you (3/4: Sansa, Cersei, Daenerys). If you are an adult woman who exercises authority, you will be killed (Catelyn) or imprisoned (Cersei), because your attempts to exercise said power will backfire (Catelyn, Cersei). If you are a child who exercises authority, you will not be killed or imprisoned, and will be seen as competent (Daenerys). It helps if your subjects are cultural Others, in which case your superiority is assumed (Daenerys). As with all female children, however, you will be sexually assaulted (Arya, Sansa, Daenerys). If you have a traditionally male role, with traditionally male skills, you will merely be threatened with rape (Brienne, Arya); if you are traditionally feminine, or occupy a traditionally feminine role, attempts to sexually assault or beat you will be successful (Sansa, Cersei, Daenerys). If you are the rare character who is an adult, occupies a position of authority, exercises power, and has not been sexually assaulted or beaten by her partner (Catelyn), don’t worry: You’re not getting out of this story alive.

VERDICT: George R.R. Martin is creepy.

Ouch. And while I’m enjoying the series, I honestly can’t argue with a whole lot of this. Now, my problem continues to be the fuzzy line between depiction and approval; I’m not comfortable drawing conclusions as to George RR Martin’s level of sexism based on these books. But I do find a great deal of the treatment of women uncomfortable or downright distasteful. It could well be that he intends this because he’s depicting a world that’s hell for women, but is he planning to develop this world into one that is better for women by the end? Or is this just the way it’s going to be? Time will tell.

In my own writing, I’m unlikely to go the Martin route because I’m just not terribly interested in sex as a matter of literary exploration. In this my work is more likely to be like JK Rowling’s than GRRM’s. I hope to write a number of books featuring the adventures of these characters, so I imagine that sex will have to come along at some point. But I’ll probably handle it subtly and offscreen, or so I hope.

A week or two ago I saw this photo on Tumblr:

A pretty large debate fired up over it. I personally found the picture deeply distasteful, and not just because it plays cut-and-paste with one of the most iconic photographs in history. I disliked it because I don’t like what this suggests about Superman, and I don’t like what it suggests about Wonder Woman. It suggests to me that Wonder Woman is just waiting for a man to come along and sweep her away, and it further seems to imply that the only man suitable for Wonder Woman is Superman, which seems odd because everyone knows that Superman’s ideal woman is Lois Lane, a normal human. I find this picture incredibly creepy because it displays Wonder Woman as submissive.

I’m not terribly interested in submissive women, or passive women, as fictional characters. (And probably not as people, either.) I want to write women who are agents of their own action, women who may need others sometimes but who can gets things done on their own. An occasional rescue is OK, but so is an occasional rescuing of someone else. And I want my female characters to think. None of this should sound odd, because that’s what I want of pretty much any character, male or female.

I really hope this post made sense.

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A to Z: Villains

A good adventure tale needs a lot of things: a hero or two or three or four, a problem for them to solve, long odds, improbably escapes from certain doom, high stakes if they fail…and a Villain. It’s often said that a tale of adventure succeeds as much on the strength of its villains as it does on the strength of its heroes. A great villain is fun to watch, and on some small level, we might even find ourselves rooting for him or her…maybe not for ultimate victory, but at least for keeping things tough and interesting for our hero.

The best villains are, obviously, people. Except for the ones that aren’t. How’s that for hedging your bets! But it’s really true. When I think of adventure movies or books that I love the most, those are the ones that often boast the best villains. And in adventure tales that fall short for me, it’s equally often because the villains just aren’t interesting, or fun, or they are so evil and despicable that it becomes depressing just to watch them in action.

A good example of the last kind are the Gary Oldman character in the Harrison Ford-as-President flick Air Force One. At first he’s OK, but as the film goes on, Oldman doesn’t play him as a person who is having the least amount of fun – a villain should seem to enjoy him or herself a little – and then there’s an awful scene where he threatens to kill a defenseless woman if the President doesn’t surrender. The President doesn’t surrender, so he kills the woman after counting down from ten with his gun pressed to her temple. The scene cast a huge pall over the rest of the movie. There was no particular thrill when President Indiana Jones defeated Oldman in the end; it was just, “OK, that monster’s gone now.”

Another such example is the Jeremy Brett character in The Patriot, the Mel Gibson Revolutionary War epic. Brett plays this guy as a lunatic who is perfectly happy to kill anyone he wants, and this culminates in a staggering scene of awfulness when he has his men round up an entire town’s people into a church…and then bars the doors and sets the church on fire. Ye Gods. (It doesn’t help that the Nazis would do just that, 180 years later.) Again, it’s so over-the-top and awful that for me, Brett’s final defeat in the movie had little feel of actual triumph.

So, who are the good villains, then? Well, they’re all going to kill…but they make choices about when to do it, and they only do it when they must. Kind of like heroes, right? Which is why it’s best if the hero and the villain can be shown to have some of the same kind of personality. I think of that wonderful scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Belloq points out to Indy that they really aren’t terribly different. “It wouldn’t take much to make you like me,” Belloq says. “To push you out of the light.” And he’s right. Belloq is a big reason why Raiders is the best Indiana Jones film.

Villains have to be motivated, and they have to act in ways that are consistent with their motivation. But villains also should, if they are to be compelling and believable, clearly see themselves as the heroes and the hero as their personal villain. The best example of this I can think of is Hans Gruber from Die Hard; he gets nearly as much screen time as John McClane, and it’s not all just Hans killing hostages and saying evil-sounding things in his lair. Gruber’s got a plan and he’s got motivations, and the film lets us see his annoyance and irritation – as well as his intelligence – when things happen that derail the perfect execution of his plan. Alan Rickman lets us see Hans’s wheels turning. Hans Gruber is one of the best villains of all time.

Of course, there are outliers to the above. HAL-9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a fascinating villain and deeply memorable, even though his motivations are inexplicable. We’re never told (in 2001, anyway) why the ship’s computer would become psychotic; it’s effective because of how odd a thing it is. And then there’s The Lord of the Rings, whose main villain is never directly interacted with, and whose physical embodiment is a giant flaming eyeball. Tolkien’s skill is such that he still manages to create with Sauron a palpable feeling of menace, and a sense that Sauron’s actions are driving everything that happens in our story.

And then there are the villains in comics. Each major superhero seems to have one or two iconic villains that they tend to be the ones to square off against: Spiderman has the Green Goblin and Dr. Octopus; Superman has Lex Luthor; Batman has the Riddler, and so forth. You don’t see very often things like the X-Men squaring off against the Lizard, or Batman having to deal with Brainiac (but you do see it from time to time). That’s always interested me…it always felt a little bit wrong when there would be ‘crossovers of villainy’. And sometimes it gets a bit hard to swallow, such as the issue of Spiderman that acknowledged that 9-11 had happened; in that issue we saw Doctor Doom shedding tears. That was just tough to believe.

Books, of course, can get even deeper with the villains. In Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Brandin is portrayed at first as an evil enough man to have erased an entire nation from memory, but it quickly becomes more complicated than that, and GGK allows us to see him as a man who deeply loves his wife. I have a friend who is watching the Games of Thrones teevee series, but he hasn’t read the books, so when he said, “Wow, I hope they kill Jaime this season. That guy’s a scum!” I had to laugh. Is Jaime a villain? He is in the first two books. In the next two…it gets complicated.

So: villains have to be motivated, and they have to seem that they are the protagonists in their story. And they should be the tiniest little bit sympathetic. You know, kind of like this guy:

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Oh yeah, “Maximum Overdrive” wasn’t a book

All sixty-two (at this moment) of Stephen King’s books, ranked. I’ve read nowhere near all of his work, and I don’t plan to…King himself admits that he can be uneven. My first King book (in 1998, after an attempt to read him during high school and not finding him my cup of tea at the time) was Insomnia, which ranks toward the bottom of this list. I liked it enough to read more of him, but generally I try to stick to the things he’s written that are fairly well-regarded. The Stand, Salem’s Lot, and It are all astonishingly good, and of course, On Writing is utterly essential.

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A to Z: Universes

Way back when, movies and teevee shows and books and whatnot used to be pretty much self-contained items. But nowadays, in a lot of cases, as specific movies and teevee shows and books and comics branch out into multiple sequels and spinoff series and all of their sequels, what becomes important isn’t so much the original story. Instead, the entire setting of the story takes primacy. Thus, a Universe is born.

At what point does a fictional setting become a universe? Star Wars takes place a long time ago ‘in a galaxy far, far away’, but at what point did it become possible to talk about the Star Wars Universe? My guess is that it was when other stories started to be told there, other than the original three movies. The emergence of the Star Wars universe seems to me to have arisen in the mid-1990s, when, on the heels of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy, a whole bunch of new books started coming out…and then comics…and then games…and all this before the Prequels started even shooting. Star Wars had become a Universe.

The same thing happened to Star Trek, when it went from being the adventures of a specific crew of a specific ship to also including the adventures of another crew, 80 years later, and then the adventures of the crew of a space station, and then the adventures of…you get the point.

And then there are the big comics publishers, Marvel and DC, both of whom have their own universes. All their respective superhero books take place in the same world, so that there can be crossover appearances that take characters from one book into another. It’s not enough to have Spiderman having his own adventures; no, every so often he has to have a run-in with, say, Daredevil or the Hulk or whomever. Most times this is just fun name-dropping, but it’s also a subtle way for the comics companies to cross-market their other books, the ones you might not be reading.

Famously, the DC Universe became extremely cluttered and complicated over the decades, until the point where the Powers-That-Were decided to do a big storyline in which the entire universe would basically be re-booted. Apparently this didn’t take, as there have been several reboots since the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Meanwhile, Marvel’s Universe, while not so complex, was still plenty crowded — which allowed Marvel to make money a few times by putting out a Complete Guide to the Marvel Universe, or something like that, which was basically an encyclopedia of just about everybody. And Marvel, too, had its Giant Enormous Crossovers, which they called Secret Wars.

In Firefly, the characters actually refer to their Universe, by calling it “the ‘Verse”. Oddly, nearing ten years after the show’s brief run, the Firefly universe is among the most beloved and yet least explored; all we have are fourteen teevee episodes, a movie, and three graphic novels. That’s it.

So, what’s the difference between a Universe and a ‘World’? For instance, nobody talks about the Lord of the Rings Universe. They refer to its world, or even to the world by its name, Middle-Earth. A Universe seems to me a primarily science-fictional concept, and needs more than one planet to be properly a Universe. But why a Universe, and not a Galaxy? Well…who knows? I personally like the word “Galaxy” better, but what if you start mucking around with black holes and stuff in other Galaxies? What if you start to dink around with multiverses? Aieee! It makes the head explode!

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Sentential Links

Links!

These links are culled from the list of blogs participating in the A-to-Z Challenge. I haven’t done enough surfing of the other participants, so herein I shall try to partly atone for that.

:: In the end, I ended up with some prince-ling guy in a toga being lazy, speaking of which, I couldn’t be bothered to draw whatever it was he was sitting on. But then again, I’m doing these really quickly. (Cool — he chose the same ‘R’ word that I did!)

:: These days, a night out at the movie theater seems to be a luxury for teenagers with excess cash, single people who are employed, unemployed people who have nothing else to do and childless couples. If a family of four went to see the Hunger Games in IMAX at the same theater I went to, that’s a total of $72 in movie tickets — before they even think about getting something to snack on or drink. Looking at entertainment options from a parents’ or family’s’ perspective — especially those who are on a budget, movie theaters don’t seem to be very family-friendly. (Isn’t that the truth. I get to a movie in a theater maybe two or three times a year these days. My last one was to take The Daughter to The Secret World of Arietty.)

:: Questionable intentions were brought by he,
Quartet gently playing in the corner.
Qualifying his earnest pedigree,
Quick to satisfy his plea for her honor.

:: A shibboleth sounds like it could be an Outer God from the Cthulhu mythos (“Iä! Shibboleth! The Black Goat with a Thousand Young!”) or a mystical stone in an Indiana Jones movie (“Behold! The Shibboleth of Akran!”) or maybe, I don’t know, a fizzy, boiled sweet (“A bag of lemon shibboleths please, mister!”)

:: Satie wrote music to dream by.

:: Everybody has some manuscripts languishing in a comatose state, don’t they? I’m talking about full drafts, or at least mostly-done, that suddenly manifested some deep flaw that drained out the spark of life. So you wrapped it up for long-term storage in your mental non-intensive care unit and figured you’d get back to it at some point.

:: The name ‘Nyota Uhura’ once translated means ‘Star of Freedom’ in Swahili. One of Star Trek’s greatest mysteries is why Uhuras christian name was never even uttered in the classic series or movies until recently in Star Trek 2009. (A Star Trek blog! How cool is that!)

More next week!

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A to Z: Trains

There’s some part of me that thinks that no matter how far in the future we get, no matter how awesome the spaceships or starships we build, there’s a degree to which human transportation will never exceed railroads for romance, intrigue, and a just plain civilized feel. Trains rule…and judging by fiction out there, a lot of writers and creators agree.

What is it about trains? Well, you have a confined setting, but it’s a setting on wheels, and therefore, the setting moves. So you get the best of both worlds: you can lock your characters in one place and watch them interact, or you can have the train stop and have some other stuff happen. Trains increase the intrigue by virtue of the fact that once on, you can’t get off until it stops. Trains lend themselves to tension in so many ways.

Trains are also a concept which can be modified to fit nearly any time frame. Trains figure in a lot of far-future stories, as far from their ‘wild west’ forebears as you can get…and yet, there they are, strings of metal cars, riding atop rails or suspended from cables or embedded in tubes. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Quade boards a train once he gets to Mars in Total Recall. In the Commonwealth of Peter Hamilton’s space opera novels, one travels from one world to the next not via starship but via train, as it’s the trains that pass through the wormholes to other worlds.

Trains can be futuristic, but they don’t have to be. The most famous fictional train right now may well be the Hogwarts Express, which departs from Platform Nine and Three Quarters in London for the great school of wizardry. The Express isn’t one of the major locations in the Potterverse, but it appears in each tale, its importance quietly understated.

Of course, trains figure all the time in “real world” fiction. There’s the Agatha Christie novel Murder on the Orient Express (whose solution is one of the more elegant to be found in Christie), and the same train figures prominently in the James Bond book and film From Russia With Love. You can’t have Westerns without trains, and one of the most riveting action films of recent years, , dealt with a runaway train.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world without trains, and I deeply wish I lived in a country that took them more seriously than others.

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A Question for Titanic Experts

I’ve been wondering this for a while, and I haven’t been able to find an answer in my cursory research, so I thought I’d throw the question up here. On the bow of the great ship, there’s a feature that I’ve always wondered about. Specifically, what is it? It’s the round thingie indicated by the arrow in this photo.

What is that? Anybody know? My geek brain tells me that this is the Titanic‘s main deflector dish, but I know that ain’t right. (Or, if that is right, man, did that thing ever fail spectacularly.)

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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