Lancer Kind

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Yes, love is a wonderful thing. Speculative Realms has now been released as an eBook which can be shipped anywhere, instantly! (Or as fast as you can enter in your payment information.) Within it, you can read about how a boy from Wyoming finds love with a woman named KanjiKiss. It’s quite scandalous really. His family wants him to stay home and help his Dad, but they had a fight at his high school graduation party so he takes a long, long drive–a drive that ends in Seattle. He’s always loved escaping country life via the Internet. But the Internet in Seattle is incredibly more advanced. And there, he meets KanjiKiss in an online bar.

This turns into a big family fight about love and commitment. He’s in love. His family tries to stop him from committing to this woman. Read the whole story of “KanjiKiss” in Speculative Realms, an eBook filled with thirteen other great stories. And get this: buy it before February and you can have the ebook edition for only $1 using Coupon Code: ST94L at the checkout. (It comes in pretty much every eBook format known to man, including the Kindle and IPhone).

It seems fitting to receive a story about Internet love in a format that is delivered instantly via the Internet. However, if you want to read it in digital form, you will need a steady internet connection, like rise broadband internet, for example. But if you are still a caveman who likes books, you can click on one of the book covers you see on the right side of this web page and buy yourself something that has a good “thud” factor. After all, you can’t kill a deer with an eBook.

Here are the other stories and their authors in Speculative Realms:

• KARMA by Sasha BeattieA mother’s determination escalates to obsession as she searches for her daughter beyond the grave.
• The Widower’s Tale by Davin IrelandA reclusive hitman discovers vengeance can’t always be left for dead.
• Where Strength Lies by Karen Lee FieldWhen warrior mages try to abduct her son, a woman must trust her past to ensure her son’s future.
• Shouting at the Stone by TW WilliamsIn a world where the most powerful magic is the loudest, a mage who has lost his voice must find a way to save the woman he loves.
• Second Chance by David MeadowsA failed writer discovers that somebody is stealing his manuscripts — before he even writes them!
• To Hell and Back by Rob RosenA boy’s love for his father is endless, timeless, and deeper than the very pits of hell itself.
• The Guardian by Lyall HendersonAboard the most powerful warship in the galaxy, a soldier must sacrifice what he loves most to save his people.
• Children of Ba-Seku by Christopher DonahueA desperate prince will use one of Egypt’s darkest secrets to try and turn back bronze-wielding invaders.

I went to Avatar last weekend and let me just cut to the chase: I loved it. I was practically hoping out of my seat in agony for the main characters, gasping when ex-marine Jake leaped over cliffs, and wishing the bad guys would just this once, stop being so damn bad. I absolutely love Sci Fi movies, and Avatar is probably one of the best Sci Fi movies that I’ve ever seen. It was incredible!

The movie touches on real issues:

• capitalism without morals (do anything to make the stockholders happy) oil companies, mining companies, or any company that places it’s products and profits above a sustainable and safe earth
• destruction of the natives (Na’vi) by corporate interests are similar to what happens to Nigerian’s in the face of today’s oil companies in Nigeria.
• a disregard for Pandora’s health is like our current disregard for Gaia in the face of global warming (Planetary health and global warming isn’t a focus in the movie. For Pandora the connection is even stronger in that the planet houses the memories of the ancestors.)
• mercenary army (more capitalism without morals) and Blackwater in Iraq/Afghanistan

Of course I’m biased by own readings and political leanings. A way of validating this would be to poll neoconservatives, free market anti-environmental policy types, and pro military industrial complex types. Since I don’t have any of these people nearby to consult with, so let me imagine their responses:

• neoconservatives— “the company’s approach was all wrong. First you get them TVs and light bulbs, and then tell them they need to build damns and infrastructure to keep the lights and TV going, and then you give them loans for those things, and once that happens, you have them by the balls. (See Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for step by step instructions.)
• worshipers of the free market — “Those tree huggers are living together in communes, shackling their GDP to “green-only” technology and that will never work. Still, it’s too bad about the blowing up the giant tree. That would have been good for the tourism industry. The company should have tried a littler harder at getting the Na’vi on board by giving them good jobs to mine their own planet. Then everyone would have been happy. You say Pandora is sentient? Hmm… I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Try explaining free market theory to a planet…”
• ‘the best military to rule them all’ guys–“The company tried to do it on the cheap. They needed more guns, gunships, mercs. Nothing like a good surge to show everyone what end of the rifle is the business end. And the mercs…. why don’t they have nukes? They could have just nuked the planet from orbit and solved the problem quickly. Anyhow, this movie just goes to show that only the best industrial complex wins. The Na’vi won round one. But the Na’vi will eventually lose unless they find a way to build up their military.”

Is this movie a work of activist science fiction? Here is what the movie showed us:

1. The Plight of Natives against overwhelming military might and the solution of resisting with everything you have.
2. It portrayed how corporations use Shareholder Profit as God as an excuse to violate human rights.
3. The movie created a wonderment about Nature and its Mysteries and contrasted that by mentioning that Earth’s nature is ruined.

Does the movie show how the viewer could take action (take action == become active == activist)?

The plight of the natives showed us that without doing something about it, the planet would be lost. The movie didn’t acknowledge (or I don’t recall) what the cost was back home for not getting the Unobtainium, where in reality, we enjoy running about in our cars and polluting and often wish that eating Salmon wasn’t so expensive. So this movie doesn’t give us the conversation about giving something up in order to keep the world we love. If the viewer is able to make the connection between today’s energy corporations and the one in the film, and then realize that there is a lot of funny business going on to give them the ability to refuel their tank, then maybe this would cause some people to become active.

The movie’s solution to Plight of the Natives is to organize resistance. This is a tough road in that most of the viewing audience will never be in the position to do this. The movie does show us the mercenary pilot and scientists becoming active members of the resistance. This is something that more of the viewers can relate to as many of them will become part of the “machine” that is doing these things and could, like the characters in the movie, organize change within.

The movie does accurately depict Shareholder Profit as God but it’s not clear to me that many people actually understand that this is the reality of how many corporations govern themselves, and the movie doesn’t try to make this connection to reality.

The movie does a phenomenal job of creating awe of Nature and its Mysteries which I hope will translate into caring about today’s environment. But I fear that the most action this movie will create is to get people hungry to play the MMOG so they can enjoy living on virtual Pandor.

There isn’t clarity of how the problems in the movie reflect what is happening today, which is critical to cause a call to action among viewers. But it doesn’t have to be activist science fiction to be a great science fiction movie. Go pay some money to see this wonderful 3-D film in the theater and enjoy.

Oh, on another note, apparently the Chinese Government disagrees with me and feels that Avatar IS effective activist SF. This Saturday, Jan 23, they are discontinuing the the 2D screenings of Avatar to make way for a biographical film called Confucius, starring Chow-Yun Fat.

I don’t plan on seeing Confucius in the theater. Sorry Chow-Yun, but I don’t like to encourage government interference any more than corporate malfeasance.

Or at a minimum, I’m sore about being disagreed with.

You remember ShadowRun? If you’ve enjoyed the CyberPunk movement but haven’t ever played the ShadowRun role playing game, then you’ve missed something that would have been right up your kind of dark alley.  Recently, I discovered a nice, dark alley in the The Book of Exodi called “A Short Length of String” by Neal F. Guye. 

The Book of Exodi (see its spiffy ember-colored cover on the right-hand side of this webpage) is filled with stories of people leaving or forced to leave their homeworld. The ShadowRun universe tends to focus on the challenge of pulling off “the big heist”. (Just because it’s the future doesn’t mean hardworking mercs don’t have their own financial crises to deal with.)  Mixing the end of the world with the “big heist” creates some interesting conundrums like: you’re risking your life for money, but the world is ending so what’s the use?  (It turns out there are several reasons.)

As I read “A Short Length of String,” I was told about a big heist, Fixers, and people that felt like Runners and Deckers, but the familiar pattern set by ShadowRun was never the same because the team was dealing with the psychological and emotional fallout from knowing that soon, the Earth will be destroyed.
If you haven’t read a cyberpunk story in a while, read this one and it will get you excited again about big guns and street samurai attitude.  And if you’re so  inclined, find some runners with whom to break out the six sided dice and build a run like this one.

I’m not in love with the term “alternative” but it works for me when I think about music–a different sound than what is usual for the mainstream media.  Of course many a smart-aleck will say, “If the alternative music genre goes too mainstream, what do you call it then?”  I call it evolution!

You see, the organizers of the mainstream (editors, producers, etc.) are doing their best to sell and sometimes that closes them to something that is really out there which may also sell.  It’s OK.  It’s a business.  Everyone is doing their best.  But if you’re tired of reading their vision of what is a great short story, try my favorite source of alternative science fiction: New Genre, a zine that comes out every so often, maybe twice a year, maybe less.  Either way, the editor Adam Golaski looks for the most interesting stories in science fiction and horror that he can find, and like the magazine’s title hints, his taste runs to stories that focus on story and less on genre.

Issue Six recently came out and like every New Genre I’ve read, I read some fiction that I wouldn’t naturally seek out and find.  It’s alternative.  Like the bands They Might Be Giants, or Eels, I have to “hear” the tune before I realize it’s something I want.

“Jack the Satellite Jockey” by Michael Filimowicz reads like a hard science fiction story filled with stats on satellites and rocketry but swerves into the realm of techno-shamanism.  How the story subtly bridges these two ideas is very cool.  The story takes place in orbit above Earth with Jack doing his job–repairing a satellite and we find out one of Jack’s hobbies is sometimes making “adjustments” to the data being beamed back to Earth.

“The Sparrow Mumbler” by Eric Schaller is in a fantasy setting and is about a man named John who has a really difficult job–he is supposed to try and swallow an angry sparrow whose leg is tied by a string to the top button of John’s shirt, and John’s hands are tied behind his back.  And let me tell you, that sparrow is mean enough to John that PETA might be more concerned about the abuse to John’s face than to the indignity the sparrow feels.

If you think that science fiction short stories end with what you can find on you newsstand (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimovs, and Analog) visit the websites and buy a copy of other purveyors of science fiction stories such as New Genre.  And by the way, those anthologies sitting on the right-side of this website contain a smorgasbord of fiction writers and literary styles too.

No one likes to see a changing of the guard. The old guard certainly doesn’t.
Today, someone younger (she was 22) told me “I never saw Star Wars, but I’ve seen Twilight.” <insert my horrified expression here>

This travesty is becoming more common. Star Wars is over 30 years old which is twice the age of the teens and pre-teens in love with Twilight.

It’s been suggested by another member of the old guard that I perform the civic duty of booting them to the head, and when they hit the ground, I stomp on them till their brains seep out their ears. (My friend Bill is a member of the violent arm of the ‘old guard.’ So watch out for him.)

Is this fair?  Can Twilight even be considered science fiction? I wouldn’t argue that you would understand the genre if you’ve only seen Star Wars, but I’d certainly feel better about that than Twilight.  But then, I’m a member of the old guard.  Twilight is speculative fiction, not science fiction.  The same goes for Harry Potter, and we know that more of the world is familiar with Harry Potter than Star Wars (people in China bring it up all the time.)  So back to Star Wars versus Twilight.

Star Wars carries itself on imaginative eye candy and has not-well-motivated dialogue in nearly all the movies. To be great, Lucas Films needs someone who actually is a good writer work on the dialog part.

I probably would never have seen Twilight except my girlfriend wanted to watch it. I enjoyed it though I would never admit this in the presence of an ‘old guardsperson.’  The writers/author of Twilight knows how to write dialogue, but it doesn’t have any of the impact of Star Wars because any discussion of Star Wars has to be taken in context of when the original movie came out.
Star Wars was innovative to the extreme for a 1977 film. It did everything that Star Trek did 11 years before Star Wars (1966), but it took the use of special effects to a new (and expensive) level by doing it all over the place. But no 22 year-old is going to have that context without a patient discussion, which I couldn’t supply because I was in shock with what I was hearing. 🙂

Twilight is just a good movie. I’m looking forward to the sequel. It didn’t break new ground in the speculative fiction movie industry.

I’m a regular viewer of Attack of the Clones episodes on Cartoon Net (well, really digital download), and I’m enjoying that for the most part though there are moments I feel like it is insensitive to clones and glorifies war too much.

So the changing of the guard will take place whether or not the old guardsperson dressed up in spiffy white armor wants to allow it.  And let’s face it, the chicks dig Edward as much as the boys of the old guard dug Princess Leia.

Why is it that I hate myself now?

There, there Leia, Lancer didn’t really mean it.