Transformers 2

First, I want to apologize to Ty for giving money to Michael Bay.  It won’t happen again.  Next round of margaritas are on me, ‘kay?

Second, I’m not going to go into details, because there’s not too much I can say that hasn’t already been said.

Third, it really wasn’t much worse than Terminator Salvation (or, as a friend said, “I don’t hate it any more than I hated Terminator.”).  I’m a little disappointed, because I really wanted to see how something could be worse.  Maybe it’s because both movies have exactly the same climactic moment.  (”Here!  Take my heart/used up oily bits!”)  There are differences:  Terminator is nonsensical; Transformers is ridiculous.

But I now have an awesome, awesome plan.  I got through both Transformers movies by pretending that they’re actually G.I. Joe vs. Transformers and the two army guys are actually Flint and Roadblock. (Try it!  It works!)  I was so happy to see them back so I could cling to my coping mechanism.  So here’s what we do:  When the DVD for T:RotF comes out, we take all the cool army bits with Flint and Roadblock and the aircraft carrier-mounted rail gun and crap like that and splice them to any salvageable cool bits from the upcoming G.I. Joe movie (Assuming there are any.  I expect they’ll mostly involve the scenes with Christopher Ecclestone, Dennis Quaid, and Ray Park.), and then we’ll have an actual, watchable G.I. Joe vs. Transformers movie.

How about it?

FAQ: Are you going to write any books that aren’t about Kitty?

Yes.

I’ve been waiting a long time to tell folks about this.  I decided I’d announce it when I had a cover to show off.  And, well, here it is.  Meet Voices of Dragons, my first young adult novel, previously discussed as the rock climbing jet fighters alternate history dragon book.  Pretty cool, huh?  I didn’t think I was going to write a YA book.  I tried writing it as an adult book, but it wasn’t working.  Then I made the main character a teenager, and the plot fell together due to various reasons I don’t want to go into because they’re spoilers.  Ta da, a YA novel.  Then Harper wanted to publish it.  How cool is that?

To answer the question a little more generally, I have lots of other books I’ve written/am writing.  Now that I’ve been writing Kitty books for about 6 years (I wrote Midnight Hour early in 2003), I’m finding that if I can skip around, and write something else after writing a Kitty book, I can go back to the Kitty books with fresh eyes and keep them from getting stale.  I think that’s important.

I have a couple of other novels that I wrote after Midnight Hour and Kitty Goes to Washington, while I waited to find out if I was going to be writing more Kitty books.  These are a superhero novel and a near-future end of the world with Greek mythology chucked in novel, and I’m hoping they’ll see the light of day at some point.  I’m also working on the second YA novel, which has time travel and pirates.  I’m cooking a fantasy novel, but I don’t know if anything will come of it.  Right now, after the pirate book and the next couple of Kitty books, I have no idea what I’ll be working on.  But something will come up.  Something always does.

The release date for Voices of Dragons is March 2010.

Jackson

So, I know this is a bit late.  But I wanted to say something, because wow.  Here’s another one who’s been around my whole life.  How odd and interesting that it took his death to remind people what a fantastic musician and performer he was.  I’m glad people are remembering that as much as everything else.

One of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever written is the bit in Kitty Goes to Washington, when Kitty’s about to go on live TV, rather against her will, and the CD she’s been handed to provide background music is Thriller.  But instead of playing the title song, like everyone expects, she plays “Billie Jean.”  And the MIB’s start tapping their feet.  Because you have to.

Two of my favorites, one from the early days, one from the later days (it is hard for me to express exactly how much I like that video).

I’m home again, for a week anyway

Airports are also liminal spaces.  They all look pretty much the same, all of them are between here and there, and they represent the transition between being away and being home again. I am home again, after spending far too much of the last two days in airports:  Kona, Honolulu, San Francisco, and good old DIA.

This week I’ll write up reports about my trip to Hawaii, which in some ways was like being on another planet.  “Oh yeah, we had to move the road when the old one got covered by lava.  And that road is closed because of the spewing sulfur dioxide.”  Then there’s scenes like this:

Pretty nice, yeah?

uncanny valley

One of my favorite psychological/theoretical/technological concepts out there is the Uncanny Valley.

The idea of the Uncanny Valley was developed specifically to talk about human / gaming and human/robot interfaces.   Remember the Final Fantasy movie from about 10 years ago?  At the time, it had the most photo-realistic CG characters ever.  But they weren’t quite real.  In fact, the movie was a bit of a flop and some people think one of the reasons was that the characters were just plain creepy — they were so obviously human, and so obviously not.  Same with something like the motion-capture CGI The Polar Express.  I think this is one of the reasons Pixar makes its people so cartoonish — because we actually like the characters better if they don’t look real at all than if they looked almost, but not quite, human.

The one-season wonder SF TV series Earth 2 had a great example of this.  (One of many great ideas the show had that were kind of ruined in the shallow execution. The show had a lot of potential and if you want a rundown of why I think it failed (admittedly I decided this after only watching about 3 episodes) I can do that later.)  The expedition leader’s kid suffered from a variety of ailments and weaknesses due to being the latest of multiple generations to be born in space (leading people to believe that humans need an earth, leading them to Earth 2 and a season’s worth of adventures).  To help him walk, he has a mechanical exoskeleton.  I absolutely hated that kid.  First off, I generally dislike kid characters, especially when their primary purpose seems to be saccharine sentimentality, which this show had in spades. (It even had a cute puppy-eyed alien that I just wanted to take a hammer to.)  But that exoskeleton:  Uly didn’t look human.  He didn’t move like a human.  His strides were jerky, the servos whined.  I mean, he was human.  He looked human.  But not quite.  Not really.  There was something subtly, horribly wrong with him.  Which of course was the point, that humans raised off-world weren’t quite human.  Unfortunately I didn’t think the show quite realized what it was doing with that thematically, or that they were illustrating a specific concept so well.

I think the concept can carry beyond the nebulous line between human and inhuman in artificial interface.  I think it can also explain the uneasiness we feel when we confront anything that treads the line between natural and unnatural.  Take this video for example:  The Big Dog.

This machine achieves agility because its limbs are based on the movement of actual, natural limbs.  But it’s clearly a machine.  And it’s so damn creepy.  I absolutely love this video, and I hate it.  There’s something hideous about this device.  This thing kind of looks alive.  It kind of looks like an animal.  But I get this simultaneous thought process:  1)  No animal really looks like that, and 2)  No machine should look that alive.  It’s getting both thoughts at once that lands this machine in the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley deals with liminality, a thing that is neither one nor another, or is both at the same time, that exists between two different states. I’ve often thought of urban fantasy type monsters as liminal as well — a werewolf is both human and monstrous.  I think it’s part of why so many filmmakers developed the humanoid werewolf — the rubber-suit-looking werewolf that is monstrous but identifiably human.  A vampire is human, but not in some very important ways.  It’s not the Uncanny Valley as the concept is generally conceived and discussed.  But it’s a useful way to talk about liminality and how these creatures can be so intriguing and horrifying at the same time.

too much analysis, again

Starship’s “We Built This City” is generally considered to be one of the worst (successful) songs of all time.  I heard it again recently after doing all my research on the late sixties San Francisco rock scene.  And it sounded. . .different.

Starship used to be Jefferson Starship, which used to be Jefferson Airplane, which was one of the bands that broke out during the 1967 Monterey Pop festival and Summer of Love.  The song seems to reference that, obliquely (”Don’t you remember…”)  I think there’s a subtext to “We Built This City” that says, Look at all those dreams we had, all that work we did, we were trying to change rock forever, and look what it’s all turned into.  Deeply sad and ironic.  However cheesy the song might sound, I’m convinced the band meant it to sound exactly like that, irony included.

15 Books

I stole this one from a Facebook meme going around:  Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

The Blue Sword (Robin McKinley)
The Last Unicorn (Peter Beagle)
Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury)
Agyar (Steven Brust)
Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)
Persuasion (Jane Austen)
Doomsday Book (Connie Willis)
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter Miller)
A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin)
The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
Black Beauty (Anna Sewell)
Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
The Book of Atrix Wolf (Patricia McKillip)
Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)

Troll

A friend pointed me to this little gem from Monday’s edition of NPR’s Talk of the Nation:  an interview with Michael Stephenson, the guy who played the kid in Troll 2, the worst movie of all time.  It seems he’s made a documentary about the movie and the cult following around it.  Frankly, I don’t understand why it even has a cult following.  Because when I say it’s a bad movie, it’s really a bad movie, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  It’s not even funny bad.  The thought of sitting through it again, even for the purpose of making fun of it, makes me gag.  But hey, I’m glad the actors seem to be having fun with it.

I’ll admit:  part of the reason I despise Troll 2 so much is that I absolutely adore the first Troll.  It’s less horror movie and more kid fantasy of the same ilk as Labyrinth and The Neverending Story.  It stars Noah Hathaway as a kid named Harry Potter who discovers a world of magic.  I’m so not making that up.  June Lockhart plays the witch who lives upstairs, and there’s a wicked troll who has to transform each unit in the apartment building into a realm of Faerie so that the whole building will become a gateway, allowing Faerie to burst entirely into our world.  It’s got Sonny Bono and a really young Julia Louis-Dreyfuss.

And it quotes The Faerie Queene.  Then the trolls sing.  I just love this movie.  Troll 2 doesn’t even have any trolls.

the all-powerful “to do” list

I’m getting ready for yet another trip, and working my way through the pre-trip to do list.  It’s going pretty well, I think.  Knock on wood.  Pre-trip laundry is turning as I speak. There may be errand-running this afternoon.

One of the things I have to finish today is going over the copy-edited manuscript for Kitty’s House of Horrors, which is due out in January (not long now, my little Smurfs!).  I’m hoping to have cover art to show you pretty soon.  At this stage, I’m usually pretty pleased with whatever book I’m working on, and that’s true this time as well.  I still think this book has the absolute creepiest, ickiest scene I’ve ever written.  I can’t wait until it comes out and I can find out if other people agree with me.  But this stage is also a little frustrating because there are lots of places where I disagree with the copy editor.  Because the voice is colloquial first person, there are lots of bits that I’m fully aware are not grammatically correct, but I want them to stay that way because I want it to sound like someone talking.  And lots of times, people don’t speak grammatically correctly.  Also, the copy editor wanted to put a comma between “Yo” and “Joe.”  No way!

The shuffle is giving me Janis Joplin and Cyndi Lauper.  Nice…

true story

I was at a friend’s house to help sew together a batch of handbound books while watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Because that’s what you do when you’re involved in labor-intensive piece work.  I did that thing where you say, “Who is that guy?  I just saw him in something, what was it?” Referring to Alan Ruck, who plays Cameron in the movie.

My friend:  “He’s the guy who commanded the Enterprise B.”

Me:  “OH YEAH!!!!  I love him!  Now I can stop worrying about Cameron because I know he grows up to command the Enterprise.”