17278--Your Inner Workings Are Showing

Sometimes fantasy and our shared reality intersect.

We're quick to tout that sort of thing when science fiction paints the blueprint for science's advances or becomes an intelligent platform for social commentary.  Usually, what we define as fantasy is composed of elements not readily or likely to be duplicated without selective changes to physics.  Those considerations are all part of the ride those adventures promise when we open the portal to other times and places.

That said, there are some things I can do without.  Political correctness is something I consider a needless corruptive influence.  I do not feel that the addition of black Vulcans to Star Trek was warranted by the lore nor a choice that improved Star Trek: Voyager.  I've never been a fan of anachronistically shoving social enlightenment into the spotlight of a medieval historical adventure, for example, just to make an excuse for throwing a female warrior into the action.  Pure fantasy, set in fictional, non-historical worlds, seems to handle that sort of thing better.  You'll find female warriors there without the baggage of a civil rights movement.  They just exist.  It's accepted and the story moves on.  Likewise, there have been female warriors and even gladiatrixes in history.  You may know about them if you went looking for them.  You may not know about them.  They didn't come with sweeping social movements.  They just were, like many of their male counterparts, and then they were gone.  The story moved along.

Tolkien's Middle Earth is supposed to be a version of Earth long ago.  Do I find it odd that all the humans are white?  Considering the world it's supposed to be, yes.  Considering the source of the fiction, I do not.  Has the homogenized view affected my enjoyment of the work or its adaptations?  No.  Skin color and cultural representations aren't big factors in Tolkien's work and not weighing upon the mind of the audience.  I will never petition for any kind of multi-ethnic representation in such work.  It'd be ridiculous.  If you want a melting pot, there's always Conan and Howard's Hyborean Age.  If you want an un-melting pot, check out Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, and watch as a series whose overarching storylines heavily involve genetic engineering gradually winnow diversity into a monochromatic central cast.  In the least subtle maneuvers of the show, the mysterious and purple Trance Gemini was not only rendered tailless, but tags out of the show to swap places with a white, future version of herself.  Maybe the make-up was irritating, but odd storywise.

Conversely, I find it a little bothersome that most of the non-white humans in the very popular products of Georges Lucas and Martin seem to be tied into slavery.  For Lucas, it's hidden under stormtrooper helmets, but all those clones of Jango Fett constitute a slave race that was created to fight a war.  For Martin, it's the Unsullied, a similarly dehumanized group of slave warriors.  Maybe it's important to their storylines that these groups be slaves, but is it also necessary that the otherwise barely represented non-white humans be slaves?  Is it a subtle racism.  Is it overt?  Is it something I'd rather not have leaking into fantasy?  There's enough here and certainly not something I went looking for in escapist fare.  Such choices would seem to be rather like a poker tell.  Or a big neon sign, flashing, "Look at how I see things!"

I suppose what got me started on this was a video game.  It was an otherwise ordinary one, fantasy world with real-time resource management that's become very popular.  Not much different from StarCraft, really, except that instead of humans and aliens, it gives humans and dwarves, elves, orcs and dark elves.  Whichever group you're running as the storyline proceeds, you send workers to gather resources.  In StarCraft, it's drones.  In this game, they're workers.  Oh, unless you're using dark elves.  Dark elf workers are labeled as slaves.  *sigh*  Seriously?  I was having a perfectly fine writing break, playing a little fantasy game, then you had to make me ask, "Why are the dark elf workers slaves?"  I know, some of you may not understand, but it just messes up the game for me by being jarred with the "Racism's still alive" hammer.

There are a lot of crayons in the box.  When the devil creeps into specific details, it says a lot about the artist.  Remember Aladdin?  Not the derivative versions, but the original.  In the Tales of the Arabian Nights, he was Chinese.  Why?  Because his tale was set in China.  The story goes out of its way, though, to make mention that there are also "evil Jews" at the marketplace.  Was that important to the story?  No, neither then nor now.  Hmmm...sounds like some cultural bias.

It ends up acting like a toxic spill, making me wonder about subtle racism in other places.  I see previews for CW's upcoming "Star-crossed" show, for example, and I notice that their idea of aliens is white kids with tattoos.  They're going to have to do more than that to give them a hard time fitting in, I figure.  A kid from the Middle East would have a harder time dating in America's middle class gene pool.

These are things that usually don't trouble my mind or cloud my writing.  I'm not a fan of hatred or stupidity.  Racism certainly isn't my "go to" when I look for motivators.  Greed, lust, envy...the classics are the ones I start with.  Racism is pretty low on my list and has to be rather visible before I make the accusation.  Just ask any of my friends and acquaintances.  Most of them are human.  They may feel differently about all this stuff than I, but that's OK.  They're friends, not clones.  Everybody's taste buds are a little different, so are the ways in which one's mind receives words and pictures and ideas.  That's what being subjective is about.

Every creation, yours or someone else's, may teach you something about yourself.

16490--Come to the Bright Side

I side with the good guys.  I'll let you know that up front.  I enjoy heroes, even the ones with the tarnish on their armor.  I'll go as far as enjoying an anti-hero when there's no better option.  I suppose it has more to do with being able to see a respectable mission statement driving their actions.  I love Superman and Wonder Woman, but I also am a fierce supporter of Batman and The Shadow and Jack Bauer.

I don't cheer for the bad guys or think they're cool.  Sure, I can see that there are varying shades of bad, ranging from the laughable and sad all the way out to horrifying agents of inhuman evil.  Some people find themselves drawn to the seductions of the dark and consider those of a heroic nature to be weak or "lame".  I keep an eye on those people.  They make me wonder about them.

I don't live under a rock, so I've seen the rise in interest of vampires as heroic and romantic figures rather than as predatory villains that an audience will enjoy seeing defeated.  I still find this a curious phenomenon and find that fighting the dark side makes far more sense.  Give me "Blade" over "Twilight" any day.  I'm still on the fence over "Star Wars", since Lucas added all that stuff about the "good guys" starting up a slave army.  I definitely wasn't crazy about Darth Maul being a popular Halloween costume choice.

Long ago, I went to watch a movie with a friend.  It was a comedy remake of a foreign film that ran longer than it needed to, but my friend really wanted to see it.  Let's just say that it focused on three men and a baby of uncertain parentage.  This was an era when irresponsible sex or, as Julia Roberts taught us, being a prostitute to a rich guy was funny.  Anyway, at the climax of the film, a couple of the men and the baby were being pursued by gun-wielding criminals intent on doing bodily harm to the helpless comic actors.  My friend bounced on the edge of her seat tensely urging the protagonists to "Get away!  Get away!" with anxious whispers.  To me, it was obvious that they'd come out OK because this wasn't the kind of movie that Hollywood was about to throw a bloody body count into any sooner than they would bring a serial killing pedophile onto "Full House" to destroy the Olsen twin empire in its infancy.  Still, she made me wonder..."Are there bad guys out there cheering for the criminals to catch the men and the baby even though it was clear that there was no chance of evil triumphing in this movie?"  There was no way for me to answer that at the time, so I filed it away in the vast brain cell storage repository I keep atop my neck.

A few years later, I was on a business trip.  I worked for IBM at the time, so they were fairly common.  On this particular trip, I had the good fortune to meet a lot of people from different parts of the country and talk with one who had worked on a computer network installation in a juvenile detention center.  Well, having not had the exposure to the criminal element that I would in years to come, I leapt on the opportunity to explain to him my movie theater question and ask if he had perhaps gleaned any insight he could offer me.  He paused thoughtfully and cocked his head to one side as he searched his own memory repository, then looked at me with epiphanous intensity as he said, "You know, they do!"

Ah, sweet confirmation!  Even though our entertainment industry has given us the hard-sell on messages like "crime doesn't pay" and "good will triumph", bad guys will cheer for bad guys.  Who doesn't like Superman?  Bad guys, that's who.  When you're composing your next work of intriguing fiction and remembering to infuse your antagonist with heaping quantities of humanity for the audience to identify with, don't be shy about making bad guys bad.  Why?  Because they are.  I've met a lot of them.  They're human, but they're quite willing to disregard that you are.  Some of them are good at hiding their dark qualities from the masses, but they do harbor them and eagerly seek the bright virtues in you that afford them ready prey.  They seek your trust and your empathy.  Whether harboring fear or anger or whatever other dark motivators, bad guys are ultimately true to their labels.  They range from the laughable and pitiable to the cold and monstrous.

Flirting with the dark may give you a thrill, but you're turning your back on what's good for you to invite something bad inside.  Next time you're relishing your gaze into the abyss, delightfully engaged by intriguing villainy, be careful not to lose yourself in there.  You have to live with what comes back out.

16397--Even Kids Know That Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones

I was recently posed a question about Star Wars' imperial storm troopers.  It amounted to, "What good is their armor, anyway?"  As someone who has watched the films many times and would like to continue (if I can get the whole "evil Jedi" thing out of my mind), questions of this nature are fun intellectual exercises.  In this case, it doesn't take the most critical eye to realize that it's a valid query.

Whether clone troopers or storm troopers, the uniformly clad, high-tech soldiers strike quite an imposing sight.  Watch them closely though, and despite their genetic engineering and thorough training, their armor doesn't seem to be helping them much.  These crack soldiers aren't just falling to blaster fire and light sabers, but suffer humiliating defeat to an indigenous shih tzu-teddy bear population armed with sticks and stones.  Sticks and stones, really?  This is the best they've got?  Look tough, but end up with your head being used for a drum?  So, they sunk all that money into big ships and death stars and...what good is their armor, anyway?

Well, nerd that I will admit to being, I bought a series of informative, secret-revealing publications released between the original film trilogy releases back in the early eighties.  They were a mix of print and pictures on glossy paper and if you unfolded them, each one opened to reveal a poster.  I never hung mine and they're, of course, safely tucked away with my many many comic books.  From those appetite-whetting offerings, I remember that the lightweight armor was supposed to be able to reflect anything short of a straight-on laser shot.  Now we all know that good guys are inherently better shots than bad guys, but I still have to question that armor's laser-reflecting capability.  I'd sooner accept that that particular specification is imperial hyperbole.  Maybe as the number of troopers went up and armor production demands skyrocketed, some corners were cut so the armor quality suffered.  Certainly, the lightweight material doesn't seem to do much against blunt impacts.  What does that leave them? 

Those shell casings they keep their troopers wrapped in actually do provide important benefits that have nothing to do with traditional armor concepts of protecting from enemy attacks.  The white exterior does serve the purpose of reflecting ambient light and heat, thus helping to keep the soldier within cooler.  Inside the armor, the clone trooper can be kept comfortable inside a climate-controlled mini-environment.  Wherever you drop these guys across the empire, whether it's desert or jungle or frosty outside, they can stay as comfy as home.  Let's face it, a comfortable worker is an efficient performer so imagine how effective a stormtrooper can be if he never even has to break a sweat.  Ideally, I would also expect that they would be afforded at least limited protection against harmful gases, bugs and biological pathogens.  Suddenly, stormtrooping is more fun than camping.  It's not xenophobia, even if we do like to think of the imperial forces as bad guys.  Back on Coruscant, I'm sure the main senate building is equipped with all sorts of decontamination protocols.  When the soldiers are on the move, it's far more practical to wrap each one than to try disinfecting a planet.

The films also show us that the stormtrooper helmets contain communication equipment.  Rapid, clear communications with fellow soldiers can be vitally important.  I would also think that the standard gear would provide a considerable amount of audio-visual enhancement to the soldiers, making it worthwhile to wrap their heads in those helmets.  Additionally, if I were designing them, the helmets would also provide tactical information displays fed by the armor's computer systems.  Each trooper would be able to see an area map, know where his unit members were, see augmented reality, monitor vital signs (his own and his squad's) and even administer drugs.  That last one, I would expect to include things like painkillers and stimulants.  Depending on how much equipment one wanted to put into the armor, biological manipulations could be done bioelectrically through systems linked to the monitors.


So those stormtrooper suits aren't completely useless after all.  How about that?  Still, as impressive as they might seem in the lab, any squad still needs to be forewarned about any stick-toting, rock-throwing locals.  Any weapon or technology is only as formidable as the people behind it.


Are there any other modifications you think would be a "must have" for a soldier on the go?  Foot and calf massaging boots?  Waste recyclers?  Muscle augmentation?  Pez dispenser?  What are your thoughts?

16364--Wait, the Jedi weren't the good guys?

Those of us who enjoyed George Lucas' little space sagas thrilled at the highs and lows of their conflict and drama, the politics and warfare, and the mystical struggle between the Sith and the Jedi.  We cheered for the Jedi when they won and felt sorrow for them when they fell.  I imagine most people did.  We were supposed to, after all, since they're the heroes of the stories.  They were the heroes, weren't they?

Somewhere along the way, the noble Jedi began to lose their footing on the straight and narrow.  I guess Yoda noticed it when he realized that the Jedi were having difficulty being prescient.  When your psychic levels of awareness are suddenly all cloudy, it only makes sense that you'd want to know why.  Blaming the Sith seemed reasonable.  A sneak attack is so like them.  It made sense to send Qui-Gon Jin and Obi-Wan Kenobi to find Darth Maul for questioning.  When they found him, though, all they did was fight him.  What happened to "Only for defense.  Never for attack."?  I know Yoda drilled that in to those mavericks, but they never asked that snarly guy a single question.  It just didn't seem to be the Jedi way.

When the Separatist Movement began and an organized faction tried to split away from the Galactic Republic, the Jedi kept themselves out of the politics of the situation.  Good for them.  When pressed into fighting, though, they didn't seem to have any issues with putting a slave force of clones out on the front lines.  Maybe they were desensitized by the fact that the soldiers seemed to have less personality than most droids and were clad in robot-face armor, but let's face facts: the clone army was composed entirely of living men who were bred and trained to serve as soldiers.  They were never offered any other options for how they might choose to live and die and no one seemed to care.  Obi-Wan was told quite clearly that the clones were genetically modified to possess diminished will, making them quite pliant to having orders barked at them, and he didn't even pause to question it.  I suppose these legions of duplicates were never expected to have any sort of lives in the great republic beyond military service.  Assuming their survival beyond fighting separatists, being part of a standing army was all anyone ever intended for them.  Weren't the Jedi supposed to be fighting for everyone or maybe the Old Republic only advocated Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness for people who weren't test tube babies.  Come on, human trafficking and slavery? 

People may have raised many debates over the merits of Star Trek versus Star Wars, but the Federation certainly never condoned abuses like that.  The Federation actually takes things in the opposite direction by banning genetic modification and such, but they had that whole history with Khan Noonian Singh and the Eugenics Wars.  You can't really fault them for trying to learn from their history.  I don't even have a guess at how many people Kirk and Spock helped free from those sorts of oppressions.

Contrasted against another champion of the oppressed, a quick "What would Superman do?" should easily produce an answer of "Not send a hundred thousand slave soldiers into a war they know nothing about simply because it's convenient to the side I support."  Barring occasional encounters with red kryptonite, when you lose your way, Superman typically makes a fantastically unerring moral compass.  WWSD?  This particular issue would hold special meaning for him since among the many accounts of life on lost Krypton, one intriguing timeline (John Byrne's post-Crisis reboot) includes a society-changing war that was the culmination of a dispute over the rights of clones created solely to provide spare parts for citizens.  With the clones as an integral part of their life insurance system, the people were provided a buffer against the rigors of time, injury, etc.  Lucas' Galactic Republic used a variation of protecting the people with a buffer of clones by just sending them out to fight rather than letting them sleep and harvesting pieces from them.

We may find ourselves faced with such considerations soon as we advance from couples having second and third children to provide replacement parts for first child in need to growing new organs to bolster our own quality of life.  This leads to the ultimate debate of sparing our children and theirs the horrors of war and new parts by just sending clones to fight and suffer in their stead.  Strict adherance to economic theory says that first child is priceless and every one after is worth less, so what does that say about originals and clone meat?  Are we willing to risk our souls to save our lives?  When the mass production of military clones makes the whole thing cheap and easy, how long will it take for people to stop considering war to be horrible?  Without strict regulation, how long will it take for cheap and easy cloning to make its way into the civilian market, changing the face of labor and human trafficking?  We'll pay a steep price to descend into a mire of devalued life and overpopulation.  Some will say it's a complicated mess.  I say it's as clear as the Bill of Rights and refer to the aforementioned "WWSD?".

Back in a galaxy far, far away, with all that moral ambiguity Mr. Lucas has unleashed, who are we supposed to cheer for?  It's hard to support the protagonists when you're thinking that maybe they deserved what they got.

So for Anakin going to the Dark Side, the fall of the Jedi Order and the collapse of the Republic into a soul-sucking imperial power, the Jedi may have to accept a charge of contributory negligence.  Maybe we can have another set of movies where the clones develop individual personalities, assert Free Will and rise up against their oppressors...all of them.  Ah, sweet Freedom.  Long live the Clone Rights Movement!

It's something to think about.  WWSD?

Did you notice any other ways that the Jedi might have pushed themselves out of balance with the Force?

16325--Drive That Truck Yourself

You're done with your story?  You've finished the rewrite, too?  Are you sure it all makes sense?  Maybe it's more of a problem with Hollywood, because we know how crazy things can be out there, and less of an issue with novels.  A Hollywood script has a lot of people messing with the final product by the time it goes from first draft to screen and most of those people won't be writers.  When you're a novelist, you're also handling the rewrites even when several people give you editorial input.  Then, you're going to want to make sure you've done all you can to make sure everything makes sense.  If you don't find the plot holes before your audience does, then someone else is going to drive the truck through them.  You want to take care of them before you unleash them on the world.

I was sitting at home this weekend and watching some of the Star Wars films.  Episode IV was running (the first film for those of you trying to keep track in your heads) and the original death star was maneuvering into orbit around the planet Yavin.  The rebel base was on a moon on the far side.  In a mere thirty minutes, the rebels would meet their fiery doom as the powerful, planet-killing beam obliterated the defenseless moon.  Or maybe they could just give the order to fire on Yavin itself.  Destroying the planet would devastate its moons.  Even if it didn't, there would certainly be a clear path for a second shot.  It had already been established that Tarkin, and by extension the emperor, had no qualms with destroying even peaceful worlds just to make a point.  What were they waiting for?  I didn't know and I shouldn't have been looking for an explanation.  That should've been covered in the storytelling.

The third X-Men film, "The Last Stand", showed us Jean Grey standing around a lot waiting for a chance to be bad.  Sure, she had already gotten rid of Scott and the professor, but those were private matters.  The X-Men had shown they were willing to deal with her mental instability internally and not hold her responsible for those lapses.  It was only after she had committed her public killing of the soldiers that her friends decided they would have to kill Jean to stop her.  Or would they?  Since the story had led everyone to converge on Alcatraz where the mutation-neutralizing boy was being kept securely, the heroic X-Men just had to turn him into Jean Grey's new BFF to get her under control.  Once again, problem solved and film ended early.  The problem, once again, was that that only happened in my head and I was left to wonder why instead of the story telling me why not.

I will repeat: You do not want the audience finding your gaping plot holes.  If that happens, you will look stupid or lazy to the people who gave you a chance to entertain them.  That will likely mean you won't get the chance again.  Granted, even though the whole Star Wars incident led to me re-plotting episodes I, II and III to do what Mr. Lucas should've done, I will continue to take chances on him.  The rest of us have a bit more work to do to build that loyal a platform.  That means we have to take the time to be thorough and aware on the front end.  No, your writing certainly doesn't have to be perfect, but your rewriting needs to show that you were striving to get there.