Tag: science fiction

Writer’s Desk: Let Your Characters Talk

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Occasionally some notable literary discussions take place in less-notable places. Take, for one example, the MidAmeriCon, 34th World Science Fiction Convention, which took place over a few days in 1976 at the (historic) Muehlebach Hotel in downtown Kansas City. There, the great science-fiction author Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination) was doing the sci-fi-con circuit that kept the genre afloat and buzzing in those pre-Internet days.

Bester took some time to talk to an eager fan for the noted genre magazine The Tangent about writing:

You know, Robert [Heinlein] said to me once—we were talking shop, writing techniques and stuff like that—and Robert said I’ll tell you what I do, Al. What I do is get a bunch of characters together and I get them into difficulties, and by the time I can hear them talk they’ve solved their difficulties and I’m finished.

I was absolutely flabbergasted! I can’t even start a story until I can hear my characters talking. I’ve got to know who they are, what they are…I’ve got to identify with them completely…

“I’ll tell you what to do Al…”

It’s likely that more writers are like Heinlein than Bester. For some of us, characters are stubborn things. If you waited around for them to talk, you might never get anything written.

TV Room: ‘Altered Carbon’

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Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunk noir novels posited a future world where death is mostly a thing of the past. Everyone’s mind can be downloaded into a surgically implanted “stack” which at the point of death can then be “resleeved” into a new body of whatever gender or race one prefers. It’s a fascinating concept that Morgan mined for a hardboiled capitalist critique but is worked out for mostly action-junkie hijinks in the derivative 10-part streaming adaptation of Altered Carbon, the first novel in the series.

Altered Carbon premieres on Netflix February 2. My review is at The Playlist.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’

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Since it’s almost Christmas, that must mean time for a new Star Wars movie. The latest one is directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper) and features a grab-bag of characters newer (Poe, Rey) and older (Luke, Leia, Chewie), plus the odd adorable critter (see above).

My article on The Last Jedi and the whole dang Star Wars universe is over at The Playlist:

Back when George Lucas was that oddball car enthusiast and confederate of Francis Ford Coppola’s with two of the greatest and weirdest movies of the 1970s under his belt — “THX 1138” and “American Graffiti” — he really wanted to make a movie out of “Flash Gordon.” But that didn’t work out, so he moved on to cranking out his own rollicking space opera. Forty years after the first “Star Wars” movie, Lucas’s rag-and-bone shop of cribs from Kurosawa, John Ford, and Joseph Campbell has now turned into its own self-perpetuating universe with an annual haul that probably beats the GDP of some small nations. The latest installment, “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” looks likely to keep that cycle going for the foreseeable future…

Screening Room: ‘Downsizing’

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In Alexander Payne’s new comedy, Downsizing, Matt Damon plays a guy who takes advantage of new technology that shrinks people in order to offset their negative impact on the environment; also, leads to a life of luxury that is not as enjoyable as he initially thinks.

Downsizing opens next Friday. My review is at PopMatters:

No, being the size of a dog’s chew toy might not be to everybody’s taste, but it’s certainly a shortcut to a kind of upper middle-class luxury unobtainable for most of humanity. Around $150k in real-world money translates into $12.5 million in the little planned communities of the downsized. That buys a lot of McMansion. As the indelibly happy Dave (Jason Sudeikis) crows to occupational therapist Paul (Matt Damon), “Cheesecake Factory? We’ve got three of ’em!”…

Writer’s Desk: See the Future

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

There’s a lot of would-be science-fiction writers out there, but it’s a crowded market and not enough buyers.

For those who like imagining future scenarios but don’t always have the best publication to place them in, there’s possibilities with a firm called SciFutures. According to this New Yorker profile, the company uses a network of a hundred or so writers (including Ken Liu of the Hugo Award-winning The Three-Body Problem) to craft customized stories for corporate clients, known as “corporate visioning”:

A company that monetizes literary imagination might itself seem like a dystopian scenario worthy of Philip K. Dick. “There can be a little tension,” Trina Phillips, a full-time writer and editor at SciFutures, acknowledged … She and [founder Ari] Popper have found that clients generally prefer happy endings, though unhappy ones are permissible if the author also proposes a clear business strategy for avoiding them. Rarely is there room for off-topic subplots or tangential characters. Phillips mentioned one story that initially featured a kangaroo running amok in a major North American city. The client, a carmaker, asked that the marsupial be removed.

More interestingly, some of their clients include the military, who is always looking for new ways to confront threats they haven’t conceived yet.

That’s where the writers come in.

Screening Room: ‘Ghost in the Shell’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Comics-Graphic Novels, DVD - FilmLeave a comment

The Scarlett Johansson live-action remake of the classic 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell hit DVD and Blu-ray this week. My review is at PopMatters:

For a movie ostensibly about uniqueness and what makes us human, Ghost in the Shell doesn’t make a strong argument for either. This is a story in which the technology fascinates and the people bore. Sense memories of other movies proliferate until you forget quite what it was you were watching in the first place. That’s the sort of thing bound to happen when the star (Scarlett Johansson) is playing a role she can sleepwalk through and the story was only groundbreaking when first filmed over 20 years ago…

Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: ‘Iraq + 100’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

iraqplusahundred-coverWhen it comes to science fiction from the Arabic world, there isn’t much to speak of. The new collection, Iraq + 100, in which authors were asked to set their stories in an Iraq 100 years in the future, is one of the few additions to that limited canon.

Iraq + 100 is on sale now. My review is at The Millions:

Unlike almost every other book you will find out there about Iraq right now, the ambitious new short story collection Iraq + 100 has little to say directly about all the nation’s recent wars. This is somewhat remarkable. As noted in the introduction by the book’s editor, author Hassan Blasim (The Iraqi Christ), “Iraq has not tasted peace, freedom or stability since the first British invasion of the country in 1914.” Still, any opportunity for Iraqi writers to get together and write about something besides the wars, even if that trauma shadows each word in this book to some degree, must be seen as a kind of victory…

Writer’s Desk: Know Your Facts

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lefthanddarknessUrsula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) is one of our greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy. She’s one of only two living writers to have their work included in the Library of America; Philip Roth is the other.

Even though she’s renowned as a fabulist, though, Le Guin’s hackles went up when the troubling new political term of art “alternative facts” was compared to science fiction. Le Guin responded forcefully to the smearing of literature:

The comparison won’t work. We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible, some of it realistic, but none of it real – all invented, imagined — and we call it fiction because it isn’t fact. We may call some of it ‘alternative history’ or ‘an alternate universe,’ but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions are ‘alternative facts.’

This might be a decent lesson for writers in trying times. Remember that while fiction must be based in emotional and physical truth to be successful, it should never try to pass itself off as truth.

That’s not fiction. That’s propaganda.

Screening Room: ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

manwhofelltoearth-dvdIn 1976, David Bowie was a rock star, but pretty much still just that. Then Nicolas Roeg cast the singer/songwriter with the alien alter ego(s) as an alien wandering around Earth and having an existential crisis. The film was remembered less for itself

My review of The Man Who Fell to Earth, now out in a deluxe new Blu-ray/DVD release with fab new digital transfer, is at PopMatters:

The Man Who Fell to Earth is one of those curious sci-fi projects that are occasionally indulged in by filmmakers who didn’t have any particular interest in the genre per se, but found it a useful springboard for their ideas. David Bowie plays an alien who’s come to Earth looking for a water supply for his drought-ravaged planet. Calling himself Thomas Jerome Newton and looking like some kind of spectral hipster in his sunglasses and anorak, he’s first spotted wandering through a small New Mexico town, pawning a ring and drinking stagnant water as though it were the nectar of the gods…

Here’s the trailer.

Screening Room: ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New1 Comment

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After last December’s palate-cleanser of a Star Wars reboot from J.J. Abrams, the franchise machine is cranking up with Rogue One, an in-betweener that fills in some plot gaps from the first trilogy without being burdened by so much baggage. That’s the hope, at least.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opens this week. My review is at PopMatters:

Rogue One is initially set apart from J. J. Abrams’ Episode VII by the loudly deployed subtitle, “A Star Wars Story”. This leaves open the possibility for endless semantic wrangling over the difference between “Story” and “Episode”. Are Wookies confined only to the former? How come Darth Vader appears in both? Are we destined to see Rogue Seven: A Star Wars Bedtime Lullaby?…

Here’s one of the trailers.

Writer’s Desk: Never Too Late

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grass-sheri-tepperThe incredibly prolific, frequently short-listed, and well-loved science-fiction author Sheri S. Tepper (Grass) passed away on October 22 at the age of 87. Tepper had a full non-writing life which included being executive director of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood in Colorado, yet still managed to publish dozens of novels late in life.

John Scalzi noted that Tepper came to writing late in life:

Aside from her considerable talents as an author, Tepper stands as a reminder that it’s never too late to write. Tepper didn’t publish her first novel until 1983, when she was in her 54th year of life; she wrote something like 40 total, the most recent published in 2014. It’s never too late to write; it’s never too late to write a classic novel; it’s never too late to be a great writer, whether or not the genre has entirely caught up with you yet.

So remember that if you ever start thinking it’s too late to begin writing. As long as your fingers can find the pen or keyboard, or your voice can make it to the dictation program, it ain’t over.

(h/t: Shelf Awareness)

Screening Room: ‘High-Rise’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

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Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise is opening this week in limited release and is already available on VOD. My review is at PopMatters:

Setting High-Rise in 1975, Ben Wheatley takes full advantage of what we remember from that time, the macramé, matted hairdos, condo living, and marital infidelity. But more important, the movie—based on J.G. Ballard’s bloody skewer of a 1975 novel and now available on VOD in the US—underlines the era’s capacity for antisocial mischief. Without today’s surveillance culture and social media, it’s easier for viewers to swallow the story’s basic conceit, that the inhabitants of a brand new luxury high-rise can, in mere months, whip up a self-contained, brutally violent maelstrom without anybody on the outside being any the wiser…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Midnight Special’

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Midnight Special, the new film from Jeff Nichols (Mud, the upcoming Loving), opened this past weekend. My review is at Eyes Wide Open:

There’s nothing more American than a chase scene. That’s one of the reasons that, looking back on Jeff Nichols’s somber science-fiction thriller Midnight Special, it’s the moments of movement and noise that come to mind. The dark Texas and Louisiana highways, an old Detroit beater with its deeply thrumming engine, the hushed sentinel lines of trees on either side, the man at the wheel driving with the lights off and night-vision goggles on, the special cargo in the back seat wearing protective goggles and reading comic books by flashlight. All the great and terrifying forces of post-millennial America are gathering in the night and searching for them: an alphabet soup of government agencies, breaking-news television with its Amber alerts, and an end-times sect convinced that they have found their messiah…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Creative Control’

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creativecontrol1

What happens when disaffected, sociopathic hipsters become even more detached from reality? See Benjamin Dickinson’s sci-fi satire Creative Control to find out.

Creative Control opens this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

The meeting convened at the beginning of Benjamin Dickinson’s tech-frazzled Creative Control contains a nearly perfect example of what a dead soul sounds like. A passive-aggressive free-fire zone of territorial scrapping, greed and ambition disguised as creativity, and lines like “philosophy is so on-trend” that will probably have been uttered in some Manhattan office by the time you finish reading this, the meeting is ostensibly about the launching of a new brand of virtual-reality glasses called Augmenta. But the story that follows is less a statement about the dangerous implications of this technology than a nettlesome black comedy about the virtual, transactional nature of modern relationships…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

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starwars1

So there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out, in case you hadn’t heard. This is Episode 7 for those keeping track. Everybody apparently already has their tickets, so good luck getting a seat.

starwars-poster1Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens everywhere this week. And no, there is no Jar-Jar cameo. My review is at PopMatters:

Arriving on screens with a strategic, not half bad recasting, Star Wars: The Force Awakens almost feels new. But as the TIE fighters and X-Wings tangle in their familiar dance and scrappy heroes cut down stormtroopers with their blasters, the echoes of earlier films can’t be ignored. It’s a pattern for J.J. Abrams, who has made a career out of ransacking the attics of more creative artists like Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) and Steven Spielberg (Super 8)…

Here’s the trailer: