Percy Jackson & Leviathan

I recently played another round of MagiQuest in Myrtle Beach.  I know that I’m way too old to be doing this but the benefit of being the youngest in a group of people means that you always, no matter how old you get for real, get to say “But at least I’m not as old as __” (who also happens to be running around with a giant plastic wand casting spells and charms.  I can’t explain the draw, exactly, other than the fact that it’s basically an excuse to pretend to be in a video game for an afternoon. Not that being in a video game for an afternoon is a particular stretch, really, seeing how often I forget to eat or even get up when Steam is open on my laptop.

In the book world I read the Percy Jackson series. Yep, all of them. I sometimes find reading young adult novels to be cathartic and comforting, and infinitely more relaxing than reading so-called grown-up books. I know it’s a cliche that young adults aren’t the ones reading young adult novels (it’s us fully grown grown-up children who do it) but the reason why is that young adult novels are forced to be interesting faster. Sure, sure, there’s reward and payoff in picking up a 1,000 page novel that doesn’t really get started until page 200 but sometimes it’s hard to find entertainment in that. But this is why and how I found myself with Percy Jackson. I enjoy the backstory and the “epic” struggle of gods and mortals and those in between. What I’m most interested in, however, is the fact that the mythology has been reworked. Overall, there are YA novels I’ve enjoyed more but there’s something to be said for any series I read in its entirety when I don’t have to. Unfortunately, I just don’t know what to say about it.

Before that, I read the Leviathan series. I’d head of these (also YA) books through a course I was taking in young adult novel writing. They are remarkably good and a bit in between steam and diesel punk in their alternate history. (I can’t figure out what the right term is. Alternate history, military machinery, animal creations; it’s sci-fi but what kind of sci-fi? I have no clue.) I enjoy nearly everything about this full series… except the inclusion of a romantic subplot, which I won’t spoil. I know it’s included because it helps the story in a few places and also because it’s sort of expected in a book about and for teenagers. Nonetheless, I have to say, I think the story would have been much better without it. Alternate history is generally a lot of fun when it’s well constructed and Scott Westerfeld does a great job of piecing it together.

I’m current on Supernatural for the first time in a really long time and I just keep asking… why?

I spend too much time imagining geeky things to do and not nearly enough time engaged in actively talking about them. Gotta work on that.

Into the Darkness of an Arrested Development

I would be a terrible, terrible fan if I didn’t talk about Into Darkness. I don’t really want to because I still uphold the belief that the J.J. Trek movies aren’t really Star Trek and are instead Space Setting Action Adventure Film #532343 with Familiar Character Names Parts 1 & 2.  It sounds cynical but so many of the things that make a Star Trek movie a Star Trek movie are the very things that separate it from more generic sci-fi and also, very importantly, from something like, say Star Wars.

Trek is, at its heart a show about science fiction. It involves science. It’s not just action and violence. There is a decided lack of science in Into Darkness.  That and I could go on and on about the ridiculousness of many things in the film.  

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

The “Khaaaan” scream being among the absolute worst of them. In Wrath of Khan, Kirk screams in a dramatic but nonetheless appropriate fashion. In Into Darkness, Spock screams it for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and for reasons that defy even rampant emotional outbursts being illogical. Jordan Hoffman addresses this very well for me, though, so I don’t need to rehash the very good arguments made in this great review.

I’m frustrated by the battling ships in the vicinity of Earth, falling to Earth with no other ships or personnel around. No one knows until the Enterprise is bursting through the atmosphere. Really? Hasn’t this trick been played out enough? (One of the worst sins of Generations was the “We’re the only ship in range, sir” nonsense while the Enterprise-B was inside the Earth’s own solar system. I mean, seriously? Seriously?)  It’s absurd that we’re meant to believe in this crap.

Others have addressed the point that Benedict Cumberbatch replaces Ricardo Montalban and that it makes little sense as Khan would have been born in the late 20th century, before the timeline split off. The rewriting here is confusing, and I adore Cumberbatch as an actor (from my limited exposure to him) and even in this role, but the role is underdeveloped. Mightily. He serves a good purpose but Khan is absurd in this scenario where any villain could have done the trick, including a new one. Wasn’t the whole point of splitting the timeline so that we could see a different take on Star Trek? No? Well, that’s certainly how it was presented.

Criminal underuse of Karl Urban yet again. McCoy was always my favorite of the original triad. Karl Urban does a fantastic job as the cynical, sarcastic doctor and he is scarcely on screen before being whisked away for yet another brain pain forced friendship between Kirk and Spock that makes not sense whatsoever in this universe.

This is still a fun movie, but it isn’t Star Trek. It’s a generic sci-fi film with characters who happen to share names with the ones from that 1966 television show. And that’s my biggest problem with this movie. It belittles the universe of ST without actually giving the audience anything meaningful to hold onto. My favorite ST series is DS9 so I’m happy to deal with dystopian viewpoints and so-called “anti-Roddenberry” doctrine so long as it serves a purpose and ultimately has more meaning than a bland “And everything mostly worked out” at the end. I confess I was originally excited to hear a Section 31 reference thrown into this movie but it went astray really quickly. But hooray, a concept first introduced in Ds9 finally made it to the big screen. Qapla!

Keith Decandido’s spoiler-iffic review of Into Darkness and the Half in the Bag equally spoiler-iffic review, in conjunction, more or less summarize the remainder of my complaints about the movie.

The successes, I think, are that it’s still very fun, provided you abandon your intelligence a little bit. It’s also tricked out with fairly humorous interactions and Cumberbatch is a fantastic joy to watch on screen.

My favorite part, however, is from the  trailer for The Internship beforehand.  Minute 2:07 is the relevant mark. (Trying to evoke Patrick Stewart is not a bad way to start out before a Star Trek movie, or really, um, anything.) 

 

In other news, I watched every episode of the new Arrested Development season four the day they were released, and I can’t believe Venture Brothers actually came back, particularly because I haven’t been able to see it yet. I saw Iron Man 3 and I’m happy to talk about how much I love the Codex Alera books. My springtime of nerdom will be complete just as soon as Korra is available to me.

It’s Saturday Night. Where’s My Two-Liter Bottle of Shasta?*

So, I know this is old news and all but remind me again why the Dresden Files was cancelled. You know, the TV show, not the books.  (Also, if we can continue to ask for eleven years why Firefly was cancelled,  I think I can venture a question about a show that came five years later, right? Right?) Twelve episodes. I know he encounters the same kind of psychotic insane things over and over again, but isn’t that nearly every television show ever? Seriously, how many episodes of Home Improvement were there, with the exact same plot in each one? At least there are different encounters in Dresden Files. Geez.

Speaking of Jim Butcher, though, I started reading Codex Alera. I think, in the NPR 100 quest, that brings me up t0 45 or so, I think. I need to do a recount.

Lastly, I finished the Warehouse 13 webisodes today.  I’m always amused at the tricks used and lengths employed to get characters into non-realistic formats, e.g. the overlay of steampunk (sorta) and the comic book format employed in these. Can’t really say the stories are any better or worse than anything in the actual show, since the show isn’t really known for being all that amazing in its plots. (I still enjoy it, though.)

 

*The all-Rush mixtape is already safely in my arms.

The Space Trilogy Brought To You By Netflix’s Inability To Update Its Spacey Shows

Thanks for taking away Farscape, Netflix. And for failing to have season 5 of Eureka, season 4 of Warehouse 13, or season 8 of Weeds. Geez. On the other hand, I’ve had time to read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

This has been an incredibly brief update on the state of my goal of reading all of the NPR Top 100 Sci-Fi & Fantasy books.

Ushering in a World of Reading & Laser Pointing Guns

For the last year and a half, I keep coming back to this top 100 list NPR published (based on polling) of the best sci-fi and fantasy novels.  I’ve read 38 of them and feel like I’m missing out on some dork cred. That said, they seemed to be missing a number of books I would have expected to see on there. For instance, there’s a total lack of Madeline L’Engle, something that confuses me.  (Get your best Gob Bluth voice ready and follow along with “Come on!”) It is nonetheless my goal to read all of these books.  I don’t really know why, since I read lots of other things and finishing this top 100 list will, in no way, prove anything about me. (I have read all of the top 10. That might be better proof of my standing.) And since Wheel of Time didn’t conclude until 2013, I don’t know how you could count the entire series anyway. I’ve read one book in that series (“Eye of the World”, obviously) but I still count it because well, it’s really up to me how I get to choose the completion criteria for my own ridiculous goals.

And yet my recent contributions to my reading include a trilogy that is not on this list: Chaos Walking. This series, penned by Patrick Ness is aimed at young adults, and is marketed as young adult science fiction. Personally I don’t see why it has to be marketed at that age group in particular since everything in it would translate equally well to the adult market.  Seeing as I’m in my thirties and found it at least as enjoyable as epic sci-fi targeted to my age group. (I’d say to my demographic, but I’m a woman in her thirties. I have never been a demographic target for most sci-fi and fantasy, with the possible exception of the Supernatural TV series. This is a sad and separate rant, though.)  What I specifically like about this trilogy is the fact that everything is not neat and tidy. It’s not a happy world ripped apart but it’s not a chaotic world that is stitched up inexplicably either. While it does have (or appears to have) the trope of lonely kid in fantasy adventure, I assure you that this image does not, in any way, harm what the eventual story becomes.

A quick nod to the much anticipated return of Community a few days back. HOORAY.

I’m Voting for Scorpius & Other Silly Updates

So, I thought I’d do NaNoWriMo this year.  This would be my 7th or 8th attempt at actually trying to do the whole 50K in 30 days. I’ve never been able to finish writing before because my self-censoring kicks in and I decide “This is the stupidest thing ever put down in words and there’s no point in continuing it just to say ‘I wrote a crappy novel.'”  I think I prefer to deal in characters than I do in stories most of the time. I’m more interested in dissecting what already exists than in creating something new.  What would probably be an ideal effort for November would be to take an old partially written story and revamp it into something else. National Novel Editing Month would be more my speed.

I thought it was awesome to find the Best of Tor.com as a free Barnes & Noble ebook.  In the fantasy-versus-scifi debate, I’ll come down generically on the side of sci-fi. Not that I necessarily think sci-fi is always better but I’m more inclined to find interest in science and technology than in magic and other kin. I’ve been hanging out on Tor a lot more recently.  Unfortunately there’s never enough time to keep up with all media I want to follow (and I actually blame this on not being able to multitask more while I’m working) so I still don’t get to do as much as I want with information on Tor.  Of course, the best thing I’ve found to do is to lump it all into my Google Reader RSS feed and just not deviate from the stream. Don’t click on that other article on the website! You’ll never make it back! (This isn’t really how I operate; it’s just how my brain tells me to operate.)

Lastly, I bought a Roku player.  These things are so remarkably simple and wonderful at the same time.  So instead of trying to finish the last season of Farscape on my laptop while I switch to other tabs to check e-mail, etc. I can actually stream it from my TV. This excites me… and also leads me to my proclamation that I’m voting for Scorpius.

the tuesday nerd round-up

So, after long-lamenting the lack of literature where kids kill kids, society has finally recognized just how exceedingly common such books are.  All of the Hunger Games books are in my “finished reading” list but until this past week I’d never actually sat down to read Battle Royale. (I love how a Google search for “Hunger Games” or “Battle Royale” also yields the result of “Lord of the Flies” and a bunch of other ‘kids killing kids’ novels.) While the Hunger Games books and Battle Royale certainly have commonalities, they’re not the same. Obviously both evoke a conversation about fighting tyranny and unjust regulations but they do so in different ways.  Without evaluating spoilers, let me just state that I’d happily see both of these side-by-side as examples of a certain genre in much the same way that Frankenstein and Dracula are considered classics of horror/monster literature. (This is not an endorsement of either of those books as being the ‘best’ in said category.)

I recently re-watched the first season of Eureka because it had been years since I saw it and I wanted to move onto later seasons now that it’s all available on Netflix. I really wish that this show had a bigger following because I think more things could be done with it if it had a wider audience. (Anything on the Sci-Fi channel [[note– calling it “SyFy” demeans me as a geek and as a person]] does seem subject to minimal popularity, though.) What makes this show enjoyable isn’t that it’s overly intellectual or that it’s got action so intense that it’s unavoidably tense. What actually does it is the quirkiness of the characters. Even when they’re silly, they’re enjoyable to watch.

Lastly, Caledea. I had a chance to play this last weekend and it’s fun and not terribly difficult to learn. It’s got some flaws, though, in that it doesn’t really leave enough room for skill and strategy once battling begins. The game relies a bit too much on luck and with its limit of four players, this makes it harder to get invested in the early strategizing. I may have won the first game (all of us were first-time players) but I pretty much attribute that to the luck of the dice rolls I made.  (Okay, not entirely, but enough of it was luck that I can’t go around legitimately calling myself the “master of Caledea,” even though that may be what I kept crying out in the immediate aftermath of the game.)  Still, not a bad use of 90 minutes or so. (It may honestly have been longer. I lost track of time.)

Sherryl Jordan & My Favorite Book

My favorite book all through adolescence was Winter of Fire, authored by Sherryl Jordan.  This young adult fantasy novel had a female lead overcoming racism and hatred, dealing with deep societal and spiritual problems, but all the while staying tough and focused. It’s not that she was a role model but rather a character who provided me an escapist hope for being a better version of myself.  (Of course this relied mostly on imaginings of standing up to bitchy girls in my high school cafeteria while wielding supernatural powers but this fantasy spun around in my brain after the first time I watched the X-Men cartoon series.) In my great benevolence to the next generation I gifted my copy of Winter of Fire to my little sister and found for a while that I could not replace it without great personal expense. (When the book went out of print, there was a period of time where all copies I could find were going for upwards of $80.) Sadly I wanted to read it again and though I could have borrowed it from my sister, I didn’t want to take it away from her. Last summer I happened to find someone who was selling a copy for $7. I wanted to hug them but instead sent them a credit card payment and received a happy used copy of my once favorite novel. I reread it pretty much immediately after the package arrived.

It’s still a fantastic book. Back in the 90s I actually did read several other Sherryl Jordan novels:  A Time of Darkness, The Juniper Game, Rocco, and The Other Side of Midnight. I really had no idea how many other books she’d written since then. I may be well past the target audience age but there is something so thoroughly enjoyable about young adult fiction (especially fantasy novels) and I think it’s because it often doesn’t try to be more than it is. Books written for adults are often built up for no good reason and you end up lost in detail. When you want something that’s lots of fun, it’s often easier to turn to books intended for teenagers. (And people say kids don’t know what they’re doing.)

I certainly thought this was true with The Hunger Games trilogy. Immediate attention grabber. Speaking of The Hunger Games, I had an extended dream the other night that the movie was released as a series of comic books. I can’t decide if that would be a good idea or a bad idea but there it is.  Reading young adult novels right now is extraordinarily relaxing and I plan to keep it up for the rest of the summer.

the bookish elf – the red-shirted masses of philosophical inquiry

Listening to Wil Wheaton read a book is so utterly confusing. It’s like being transported back in time twenty-five years to my pre-adolescent crush on Wesley Crusher… because his voice hasn’t changed that much. That’s kind of weird. Fortunately, I now think of Wil Wheaton as just being an awesome nerd and therefore his narration of Redshirts is great. A nerd reading a nerd book written by a nerd. It’s pretty fantastic. I downloaded it from Audible last week and it’s a silly story but it’s based on the tropes of a certain science fiction television series franchise that liked to kill off “Ensign Ricky” for dramatic flare. (Yes, that was a Family Guy reference but at least it was one from back when the show was still funny and still had room for things besides Seth MacFarlane’s ego.)  It’s a book for geeks and I’m generally pretty happy and proud to stand up and say “Hooray, I’m a geek” so yay, a book for me.

I also recently read Batman and Philosophy, which is utterly silly but I have long used the Blackwell Pop Culture & Philosophy books as my own version of trashy beach reads. Some people opt for romance novels or chick lit. I choose watered down philosophical inquiries based on superheroes. Who can say which is better? (I can. Superhero philosophy is still a thousand times better than tacky, predictable romance nonsense.)   Of course, porting around a copy of this book mostly seemed to make my coworkers think I was a weirdo but again, it’s hard to care.

The real meat of this is how I have to confess to never having read Dune before now. How many nerd points do I lose for not starting to read that book until 2012?