Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Well, I forgot to mention, but I’ve been in Italy for a week following my wife around and attempting to conquer the country with exactly 25 words of badly conjugated Italian. Which is more possible than you’d think. I got more mileage out of can you tell me where and quanto devo than you’d ever imagine. Of course, everyone seemed to speak English there as well, and this is what usually happened:

JEFF: <garbled, barely-intelligible and badly pronounced phrase in Italian that loosely translates to excuse me, but can you the bathroom in the footwear? Pizza!>

ITALIAN GENTLEMAN: <Sighing>. You’re an American, eh? Give me fifty Euros.

JEFF: Grazie!

Anyway, it was a fine trip, aided by the fact that even in these sad modern times you can jab a meaty finger at a menu and grunt hopefully, and something will be brought to your table. Sure, sometimes it’s Tripe, but that’s Italy.

The trip made me think about world-building, actually, because there are places in Europe which are so drastically different from America, yet they both exist in the same world. Heck, even cities in Italy are very different from each other; Florence for all its Renaissance charm feels much, much more modern than nearby Siena, where Black Death and war apparently froze development for hundreds of years, leaving the city little changed, in some ways, from its Medieval roots.

This got me to thinking about writing science-fiction – at least SF that’s based in the future, like mine. What you’re always trying to accomplish with futuristic SF (well, maybe not always, but a lot of the time) is a believably weird extension of our present. This is sometimes a fine line to walk. On the one hand you want there to be technological advances and seemingly-impossible, unexpected cultural shifts. On the other hand, you want to avoid creating a future world that is completely wonky and disconnected from the previous state of things. Things here in the 21st century might appear bizarre and incomprehensible to someone from the 14th, sure, but there are threads of things that remain the same. A road is still a road, a loaf of bread is still recognizable. Some things – more than you might expect – have remained the same.

This principle applies, I think, to any story set in a future Earth: You have to avoid the temptation to re-imagine everything. Because the future, unless it is so far away as to be completely disconnected with the present, is an extension of said present. Things only change when forces act upon them – better technology, changing climates, new ideas. Some things stay the same despite technology and time, simply because no one can conceive of any advantage to changing them. If you can think of a reason why people will be wearing bizarre plastic suits in the year 2109, fine, go on ahead. You don’t even have to explicitly detail why or how, as long as there’s a reason in your head as you write. But if you can’t think of a good reason why people would wear bizarre plastic suits. . .then don’t make your characters wear bizarre plastic suits.

Look around: I’ll bet you there is tons of technology and infrastructure around you that is old. They invent all sorts of cool new things, but the old sludgy things stick around a long time. The water pipes in the ground in my home town are 100 years old. There’s tons of old copper wire strung between houses. Old cars, old buildings, old technology – just because new stuff gets invented doesn’t mean the old gets swept away in a glorious tide of newness, so if you make your future world a shiny example of all-new everything, it’s going to feel a little plastic.

Just one writer’s opinion, of course. And a drunk writer at that. And a drunk writer with just 25 words of Italian under his belt. What sense could I possibly make?

So, I saw Star Trek over the weekend. Good movie, didn’t taste much like Star Trek – even Nimoy’s reading of classic Spock phrases sounded like they were from a different universe – but fun nonetheless and I have little doubt it will spawn several sequels, until, inevitably, this series gets bogged down in bad writing, new directors, bloated actors, and doomed attempts to have the greatest special effects evah. I’m not exactly a rabid Trek fan, though; casual would be the right word for me. I’ve seen an awful lot of Trek material in my day, but I don’t exactly keep track of it all. So the only real question for me was whether it was a fun movie, and it was.

I mean: Damn, that was one shiny movie. You could run it with the sound off and it would still be kinda entertaining.

It did make me think about other things: JJ Abrams thinks Slusho is a lot more interesting than it actually is; he’s one of the few filmmakers out there who seems to have had a drink in an actual bar at some point in his life; a girl in green skin makeup will never look like she’s an actual alien; and something else: This awesome/horrible new trend of rebooting old series.

Just in the past few years we’ve seen Batman, Superman, Star Trek, and James Bond reboots – defined as a new movie that dispenses with established canon and timeline and just, well, starts over. From a practical point of view, this is a great and necessary strategy, as it allows for the clearing away of deadwood actors, cumbersomely intricate backstories, and outdated design and special effects. Especially when your series has been losing ticket sales and popularity of late, it’s an obviously good decision, even when the resulting movie doesn’t turn out too well (Superman Returns, we’re looking at you).

The real question is: Are Reboots good for us, the consumer? Are they merely cynical ways to get kids into the seats, ignoring older fans and trashing decades of established storylines and mythology, or are they ways to wring a new freshness from an old story? Wouldn’t it be better if Hollywood actually created new stories instead of dusting off old ones – I mean, wasn’t there something startling and original they could have spent money on instead of Star Trek? We’ve all seen Star Trek, in one form or another, haven’t we? On the other hand, when Hollywood does trot out a new story, it usually sucks, so maybe rebooting a series that at least has the dessicated glory of its past clinging, barnacle-like, to its belly is better.

After a lot of thought over beers, soul-searching, and absolutely no research or determined discussion with people holding differing opinions from my own, I’ve decided that reboots are, in fact, mostly harmless.

As a writer, I struggle occasionally with the fact that once I release a work into the wild, so to speak, I cease to own it. It becomes collective property. Oh, I own the copyright, of course, and have some control over what happens with it, but people can decide whatever they want about it. They can interpret as they see fit, and they can critique, discuss, and reach whatever conclusions they want to, as well. Nothing I can do about it, and that’s fine – that is, in fact, as it should be. A franchise reboot is, essentially, the same thing, really. You release movies into the wild, and they get reinvented after a while, even after everyone who worked on the originals has died and thus cannot provide any more creative ideas.

In short, I can dislike a particular reboot, but I can’t dislike the concept of reboots as a whole. Or, better said, I can dislike the idea, but I can’t think of a real argument against them. Which is the slogan of the lazy mind, and thus: My slogan.

Of course, would I have the same opinion if someone were to reboot my books in book form? That is to say, what happens if, 30 years from now, Avery Cates seems like a stuffy old-timey kind of character, the kind of story that makes people say Well, that’s how things were back then. Sort of the way we look at spy movies from the 1960s – in other words, aching for a reboot. And they hire some dashing young author to whip up a fresh, hip new version of the character and the universe. How would I feel about that? Aside from the obvious answer, which is: Nothing, as I’ll likely be dead from liver disease. If I was still alive I doubt I’d be interested, unless I had some serious balloon mortgage payment to make, or some serious health insurance premiums. In which case: Sign me up, I’ll write fucking Avery Cates children’s books if I have to. Barring that, I’d obviously rather write new stories than reboot old ones.

If I’m dead, go with Gary, what do I care? I don’t know if the reboot idea will ever invade the literary world – movies, requiring so many fingers in the pot, are much more apt to be groupthink projects that view idiosyncracies as problems for marketing. If it does, I wonder if they’ll make Avery Cates a teenager or something.

Like a lot of folks, I’ll likely see Star Trek: The New Hotness this weekend. I skipped the last 2 ST movies (I never even rented them) due to a lack of interest that bordered on disdain; I don’t know if it was the fact that the Next Generation characters had been played out or if it was just the lifeless and automatic nature of the storylines I gleaned from the ads and reviews, but I barely noticed these movies existed. When a kid I’d been really excited by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its first three or four sequels, and I recall getting a bit jazzed when they combined the NG cast with the TOS cast for Generations, but after that it gets cloudy. The problem I think is simple enough: If you’re not willing to take any real chances with a universe, if you’re not willing to kill off characters and shift political realities – if you’re not willing to mess with the basic infrastructure of a universe – it gets dull. No matter how inventive the story is, we all know every movie ends with everything status-quo, and that gets dull.

Star Trek II through IV managed to escape this, I think, via Spock’s death and eventual resurrection. Having Spock die was unsettling, having him come back as a decidedly changed man was unsettling, and unsettling is good for stories.

Anyway, we’ll see what JJ has done with this storied franchise. I’m interested in how he handles the tech stuff, because some parts of Start Trek have not aged well.  Sure, beaming up is still cool, ships hurtling through space remain beyond our reach, and phasers still have that tang of futurism on them, but other things are hit-and-miss: The Communicator, for instance. Sure, the thing can put you in touch with your ship light years away, instantly, apparently without network outages, but the Communicator would fail if introduced to the market today. A single-purpose speech device that does nothing else? The iPhone would eat it alive. Maybe if combined with the Tricorder – and one wonders why no one ever thought to suggest this back in 1966 – there’d be a chance, since apparently the tricorder can be rejiggered in a variety of ways to do almost anything.

One thing I’m still waiting for, of course, is the replicator. Although the day I can just keep ordering Scotch from the microwave without having to get up from my chair is probably the last day you see me. Some folks might get lost in the Holodeck, but I will be lost to an endless supply of consumables, limited only by imagination. Monkey-flavored beer? Why not. The fact that it always seemed like we’re supposed to be blown away by the warp drive and the beam-me-down stuff while taking the replicator in stride is weird anyway. The replicator would solve world hunger and any other shortage problem, immediately. Gold would be worth about a penny a pound and the world economy would collapse, but we’d all be fat on Twinkies and Root Beer. Assuming you can afford a replicator, which would probably cost somewhere around forty or fifty trillions dollars apiece.

But I digress.

Updating a story like Star Trek so that it seems like science fiction again to a modern audience is tricky. On the one hand you don’t want to step on all the things that people love about it; on the other you’d got to clear away some of that 1960s and 1980s gunk that’s cluttering everything up. I’m glad to hear the rumor that they’re keeping the miniskirts, although that maybe doesn’t fall under the category of technology. I will also miss Shatner’s legendary. Speech. . .patterns, and hope the new guy doesn’t try to imitate them too much, if at all, but again, maybe that doesn’t have anything to do with SF. Unless a Romulan Brain Worm infestation is revealed as the source of Kirk’s speech impediment. Which would rawk.

Over at IO9.com, they’ve linked to some game footage of Bioshock 2, which of course has me very excited, as I lost several weeks playing the first one. Although ultimately I found the game to be a little unsatisfying – a little too repetitious, and a lot of the things that were supposed to make the game feel huge and nonlinear, like the plasmid system, ended up being unnecessarily complex and confusing without really adding any depth to the game – it was still a four star game, with a great storyline.

IO9 also mentions a Bioshock movie in the works, which dismays me, because, as we all know, movies made from video games have been discovering heretofore unknown depths of suckage for decades now. I mean, has there ever been a movie adapted from a game that wasn’t the worst movie of the year? I submit that there has not. And I am never wrong. Or at least I don’t remember being wrong. The fact that I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday doesn’t change the fact that I am always right.

The reason video game movies always suck is simple: Video games can and have, at times, developed storylines over the course of hours and hours of gameplay, involving multiple settings, dozens of characters, reams of dialogue, and copious visual detail. A movie is meant to convey all of that in about 90 minutes, maybe 2 hours tops. It’s an impossible task. Look at Half life, my other favorite first-person shooter. You could make five or six movies out of the first game alone, and even if you boiled it down to major set pieces and cut out a lot of the crawling through ducts and puzzling over physics puzzles designed simply to show off the game engine, you’d still probably have a four hour movie on your hands. So the movie version tend to either abandon the game’s actual characters and storyline completely, or strip it down to monsters and special effects, hoping someone like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson can keep you entertained with just his pecs and eyebrows.

Video games are also getting increasingly cinematic, with graphics getting nearer and nearer photorealism and game engines getting better and better physics models. You see where this is going: As our computer monitors get bigger and bigger, eventually melding with our televisions and the Internet so that there’s very little distinction between them, movies are going to become video games, and vice-versa. Eventually you won’t drive to a theater, buy a ticket, and passively watch a movie for 2 hours. You’ll pay $50, install a game, and spend the next few weeks experiencing the story.

I’m actually looking forward to that – I’d love to write a video game, figuring out all the fun ways the player can interact and possibly even affect the story. Bioshock had a very tentative and small way for the player to alter the ultimate ending, depending on how the player treated certain Non-Player Characters during gameplay, but this really only affected the final cutscene and the mood of the ending, nothing else. While the programming challenge is huge, it would be fun to write a sort of “pick-a-path” kind of game where your decisions actually alter the game’s behavior as you play, in a significant way.

Until Bioshock 2 comes out, I guess I’ll just play Portal again.

The other day, my publisher called:

ME: Hello, this is Jeff–you may already owe me money*.

PUB: Actually, after reviewing the accounting, you actually owe us sixty-four thousand dollars after triggering the morality clause in your contract, but that’s not why we’re calling.

ME: If it’s about those office supplies, I can explain. I was drunk.

PUB: What office supplies?

ME: Sorry – I am drunk. What did you want?

PUB: We’re putting out a new edition of The Electric Church, anything you want to change?

ME: I’d like to change the title to JEFF SOMERS BADASS KILLING MACHINE. Also, I’d like to change the main character’s name to Jeff Somers.

PUB: <dial tone>

We’re entering into a weird era for writers, I think. Technology is going to offer us the opportunity at some point to continuously edit and revise our work. Once our books and stories are out on Kindles and yet-to-be-invented devices, we’ll be able to suddenly decide to clarify a character’s motivations in chapter 25 and beam it out to everyone overnight. Readers wake up the next day, switch on their readers, and boom! A new changed version of the book.

Some authors never stop revising, and for them this is probably a wonderful thing. Heck, some authors would love to completely re-write their books thirty years after publication, whether because they suffer from Authorial I Suck Syndrome or because changing technology/history makes their story inaccurate or laughably dated. Me, personally I tend to regard things as finished and if I decide years later that I didn’t do a very good job, or that I could do better, I’d rather just write a new version of the story from scratch. Whether or not authors will like the ability to do this, I think the better question is whether we should be allowed to, and what it would mean for readers.

I’m not sure it would be so great for readers, actually. The idea that my copy of a book can shift without my knowledge – or, hell, with my knowledge – is horrifying. Bad enough for fictions, where the very scene or dialog that grabbed you and made you fall in love with the story could be completely rewritten or deleted years after you read it, but imagine history books being edited remotely, biographies, anything. You can go totally paranoid and imagine every reference to some political event erased from every book, ever, or you can stick with the depressing thought that should I someday have a Philip K. Dick stroke-moment, I might be able to go back to The Electric Church and insert lots of giant bunny rabbits speaking Latin.

Of course, death silences all of us, so eventually a book will have to settle down into a canon version. . .unless of course the estate, which will hold the copyright for a while (possibly forever and ever if things keep sliding towards hell the way they have been). It’ll be great when the grandson of a writer can go into their ancestor’s files and start editing their books, won’t it? Watch and see. I think Douglas Adams once speculated on how horribly chaotic history would become once we developed time travel, well, this is it: A world where nothing will ever be set in stone ever again. Unless you actually carve your book into tablets as some sort of marketing gimmick. Which is genius.

At least you can count on my disastrous disorganization and laziness to protect you from this fresh hell in my books at least. Though be careful when my liver finally pops: The wife is very eager to get in there and “correct” my books. Read ’em while you can.

*My standard greeting

Y’know, you just don’t have to read, watch, or listen to anything any more. Welcome to the future, and the future is spoilers.

This is not an anti-spoiler rant. I have no worries over spoilers. Demanding that every piece of entertainment be delivered to you pristine and unexplained in any way is ludicrous; half of the power of good fiction is poring over it and gleaning the details, the references, the tiny points that reward careful attention. If knowing the ending to a story ruins that story for you, then 99% of the literature and filmed entertainment ever produced is already ruined for you, and that’s just sad for you, to be that limited.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go into new things fresh – for example, you don’t mind that you know how The Lord of the Rings ends, you still re-read it occasionally, but when Watchmen comes out, you want to remain ignorant of it until you watch the movie so you can experience it as pure new story, well, that’s fine. But if someone does spoil the story for you, the only reasonable reaction is to shrug and go see the movie anyway, because if the story’s any good, it won’t matter.

Anyway: This is not an anti-spoiler rant; I sleep on a mattress made of spoilers and I sleep well. No, this is about the Cloud.

The Cloud is the web, mainly, although it’s also people around you. The Cloud is the repository of spoilers out there, the ongoing discussions about TYV shows, books, and movies. The Cloud basically contains the entire plot of every new book, movie, or TV show, plus the detail analysis and exhaustive revelation of Easter Eggs. The Cloud means that you no longer have to watch or read anything in order to be perfectly familiar with it.

I have never watched an episode of the new Battlestar Galactica. Yet, I can give you a decent plot summary and even discuss the basic themes of the show, and a smattering of the complaints people have had. It’s like I’ve actually watched it. All because of web sites like I09 and the like – hell, I’ve seen clips, read detailed reviews and analysis. Having never actually watched the show, I could convince you otherwise at a party.

Part of this is because I am a Catholic-church-trained liar, and we Catholics learn to lie with the best. I could also convince you I am wearing pants, when I clearly am not. But I digress.

I have also never seen the movie Watchmen or read the graphic novel, but I know the plots of both, plus a boatload of background details. Am I a mindreading genius? No, I’ve simply read so much about it, I’m like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day: I’ve been around for so long I know everything. IO9 even provided a handy analysis of the opening credits sequence for me, which gave me an abundance of tiny detail to work with.

We are entering a period of time when you don’t actually have to read or watch something to know all about it. Yes, you’re missing the wonderful details, the craft, and the joy of good writing. But on the other hand, you can now, in a way that was impossible not so long ago, determine pretty exactly whether you’re truly interested in a book, movie, or TV show before you actually put much time and effort into it. Just by dipping into the Cloud, you can get very good idea if you’re going to like something before you invest in it. And that’s a good thing, I think. But then, I don’t fear spoilers. I only fear children. And adults. Stop judging me.