(1) THE PUPPET’S INSIDE STORY. Mary Robinette Kowal livestreamed “Ask a puppet about publishing” today. The answer to the old standby “Where do you get your ideas?” got perhaps the truest answer that has ever been given to this question.
(2) GREG KETTER MAKES NEWS. The legendary Minneapolis bookstore is featured in Twin Cities Geek — “From the Stands: DreamHaven Books Is Still Standing”.
A later memory I have of the store is hearing Neil Gaiman read his book The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish there upon the book’s rerelease in 2004. I remember maybe 35 or 40 people in the store, which can’t be correct—there must have been more than that to see Neil Gaiman—though I’m certain it was a number far smaller than you’d expect to see today, in the age of expanded cons, fandom, and the Internet social-media grapevine. Except for running into Gaiman a few weeks later at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival (and a few other places, actually—that was a weird summer), I wouldn’t see him again in the flesh until an MPR Wits show last year, crammed into the Fitzgerald Theater with over 1,000 other fans. That show was a little closer to what one would expect of a Gaiman sighting, where Neil is a smudge, his pale face and customary black clothes treating us to an impromptu and sparsely populated Mummenschanz show against the stage’s dark backdrop, not at all the mild, T-shirted man with the roiling mind, reading to us about the best deal you could get in a trade for your dad.
… Last April, DreamHaven returned to normal store hours with the help of Alice Bentley, a former business partner of Ketter’s. The two co-founded the Chicago bookstore The Stars Our Destination in 1998, which Bentley ran by herself from 1994 until 2004, when she closed the store, moved to Seattle, and got out of the book business. Says Ketter of Bentley, “She had been out of books for a while, and she really wanted to get back in. So, she moved to [Minneapolis] from Seattle and she’s partnering with me . . . She’s very knowledgeable; in the last 11 or 12 years since she left, things have changed a great deal [but] she’s been very happily relearning the book business.” The two now run the business as partners, with Ketter as the “go-to guy for questions” and Bentley employing her “love of spreadsheets” to keep the business on track.
(3) SPURNING PASSION. Andrew Porter recalls, “I wanted to reprint a Tolkien poem first published in the 1940s, and Tolkien refused me permission — and then he refused a whole bunch of other people including Ballantine Books, and it’s still not been ‘officially’ published. But some people got tired of waiting for “official” publication, and here it is, on the web: “The lay of Aotrou and Itroun” (1945).
A witch there was, who webs could weave
to snare the heart and wits to reave,
who span dark spells with spider-craft,
and as she span she softly laughed;
a drink she brewed of strength and dread
to bind the quick and stir the dead;
In a cave she housed where winging bats
their harbour sought, and owls and cats
from hunting came with mournful cries,
night-stalking near with needle-eyes.
(4) TELL ME IF YOU’VE SEEN THIS BEFORE. At MeTV, “7 reused props on television that will make you do a double-take”.
Neosaurus Disguise:
Lost in Space’s creator Irwin Allen liked to recycle props, but one of his most notable ones was reused by another iconic ’60s TV show. The neosaurus disguise first appeared in Lost in Space:
(5) NEW SAWYER NOVEL. Robert J. Sawyer’s 23rd novel Quantum Night will be released March 1 in hardcover, ebook (all formats), and as an audiobook from Audible.
What if the person next to you was a psychopath? And that person over there? And your boss? Your spouse? That’s the chilling possibility brought forth in bestselling author Robert J. Sawyer‘s new novel Quantum Night. Psychopaths aren’t just murdering monsters: anyone devoid of empathy and conscience fits the bill, and Sawyer’s new science-fiction thriller suggests that there are as many as two billion psychopaths worldwide.
A far-out notion? Not at all. As Oxford Professor Kevin Dutton, the bestselling author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, says, “Sawyer has certainly done his homework about psychopaths and he understands well that, far from being just the occasional headline-grabbing serial killer, they’re everywhere.”
Sawyer says: “Reviewers often call me an optimistic writer — one of the few positive voices left in a science-fiction field that has grown increasingly dystopian. I like to view my optimism as a rational position rather than just naïveté, and so I felt it was necessary to devote a novel to confronting the question of evil head on: what causes it, why it flourishes, why there seems to be more and more of it — and what we can do about it. The theme is simple: the worst lie humanity has ever told itself is, ‘You can’t change human nature.’”
Click to read the opening chapters. Details of the Canadian and U.S. stops on Sawyer’s book tour can be found here.
(6) OSHIRO STORY CONTINUES. Here are links to new posts dealing with Mark Oshiro’s published harassment complaint.
The Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, Inc. (KaCSFFS) is the sponsor of ConQuesT, the oldest convention in the central states region. The KaCSFFS Board of Directors oversees ConQuesT, but the day-to-day operations of the convention are done by the volunteer chairs and convention committee, who change from year to year.
In light of recent issues we feel that more oversight of the convention committee as a whole is necessary by the KaCSFFS Board of Directors. This is being addressed by the current Board of Directors as we speak.
KaCSFFS is profoundly sorry that these issues arose, and the policies in place were not followed through to completion. We are taking steps to ensure that future complaints are addressed appropriately and in compliance with current policies and procedures in place.
Posted by Jan Gephardt
The KaCSFFS Board of Directors is: Margene Bahm, President, Earline “Cricket” Beebe, Treasurer, Kristina Hiner, Secretary, Jan Gephardt, Communications Officer, Keri O’Brien, ConQuesT Chairperson for 2016, and Diana Bailey, Registered Agent.
- M. C. Hana: “Mark Oshiro Speaks Out”.
From SFF and romance convention attendees alike. To the point that I’ve applied some probably unfair stereotyping of my own, in deciding that media and writers’ conventions in Those Four States (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri) are probably off limits to me. If I won a lottery tomorrow and travel costs were not an issue…I probably wouldn’t change my decision.
I get told, rightfully so: ‘That’s unfair. We have lovely, diverse people at X convention or Y festival! By not attending, you are letting the bad people win!”
True. I know some good people in those places. I’d love to visit them. There is a large romance convention in Texas and an even bigger SFF gathering in Kansas City that I *should* attend for career reasons. (Except that the romance con has a dismal record respecting M/M romance authors, and I’m not sure I’m at the professional level to go to the SFF con yet.)
By not attending, I’m not validating some indefensible behavior from con committees who keep getting away with this shit, and use fans and sane staffers as their human shields. I’m not paying into the tax coffers of hotels, cities, and corrupt hypocritical legislatures who still seem to be stuck in Pre-Civil Rights America. By myself, I’m a nobody, and I only have power over what I personally spend and buy.
- E.P. Beaumont: “In support of Mark Oshiro: my shit experience at CONQuesT 2013”.
I was unlucky enough to get tapped for a self-pub panel at CONQuest (Kansas City 2013) that consisted of me and two gatekeepers who bloviated the entire time, talking over anything I had to say. Lawrence M. Schoen was the moderator who opened his introductory email to me with a declaration that nobody should self publish unless they’d already been vetted by the publishing industry. He also used the term “politically correct” which prompted the following response from me:
“Please do not use the term ‘politically correct’ in my presence. My colleagues and mentors include survivors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Soviet GULag. Current American usage of this term trivializes these mass atrocities in the service of defending lazy-minded reflexive bigotry.”
In response, he doubled down on his insistence on right to say anything he liked.
On the panel, Silena Rosen was particularly notable for her crude, hostile manner as well as rant about how self-pub was shit, fanfic was public masturbation, yadda yadda yadda. Schoen wasn’t so much a moderator as a partner in the pile-on. I had quality assurance experience from multiple industry jobs, and a whole list of suggestions for editorial collectives and the like. They talked right over me as loudly as they could. None of that stuff even got said.
I felt the whole time as if I were fighting with both hands tied behind my back. I was there to give the audience new ideas and perspectives and to present myself with courtesy and professionalism; they were there to beat me up in public.
- Larry Correia made this Oshiro-related comment in his R.I.P. Twitter post.
I don’t know anything about the Oshiro thing. Is that the one where the guy was the GoH at a con and didn’t get treated well? I’ve seen that in passing is all. I can only assume that if File 770 is upset over it, they’re either on the wrong side, or just plain stupid.
A bunch of comments from File 770 are reproduced in that same thread. Which is great, because it proves how many of Larry’s fans find this blog despite his refusing to allow pingbacks from my posts, and how they force the rest to read the material anyway.
(7) REASONS WHY DOING NOTHING IS WORSE. Jim C. Hines reviews the recent history of convention antiharassment policy enforcement in “The Importance of Having and ENFORCING Harassment Policies at Cons”
I get it. It’s one thing to write up policies on harassment and appropriate behavior for a convention. It’s another to find yourself in the midst of a mess where you have to enforce them.
Emotions are running high. The person accused of violating the policy isn’t a mustache-twirling villain, but someone who’s been attending your con for years. They’ve got a lot of friends at the con — possibly including you. If you enforce the consequences spelled out in your policies, someone’s going to be upset. Someone’s going to be angry. Someone’s going to feel hurt. It feels like a no-win situation.
And it is, in a way. There’s nothing you can do to make everyone happy. But we’ve seen again and again that there’s a clear losing strategy, and that is to do nothing. To try to ignore your harassment policy and hope the problem goes away on its own.
It won’t. As unpleasant as it is to be dealing with a report of harassment, doing nothing will make it worse. Here are just a few examples from recent years.
(8) THE F IN SF IS NOT FILLET. Seeing a comment on File 770 about all the fiction with “bone” in the title, Fred Coppersmith recommended:
https://twitter.com/unrealfred/status/702285447217745920
(9) HENCEFORTH THEY WILL BE CALLED FUCHSIA HOLES. Gazing at black holes – “What does a black hole actually look like?” at Vox.
Impossibly dense, deep, and powerful, black holes reveal the limits of physics. Nothing can escape one, not even light.
But even though black holes excite the imagination like few other concepts in science, the truth is that no astronomer has actually seen one….
We do have indirect images of black holes, however
Some of the best indirect images of black holes come from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, where Edmonds works. “The friction and the high velocities of material forming out of a black hole naturally produces X-rays,” he says. And Chandra is a space telescope specially designed to see those X-rays.
For example, the Chandra observatory documented these X-ray “burps” emanating from the merger of two galaxies around 26 million light-years away. The astrophysicists suspect that these burps came from a massive black hole: …
Similarly, the fuchsia blobs on this image are regions of intense X-ray radiation, thought to be black holes that formed when two galaxies (the blue and pink rings) collided: …
Be sure to check out the fuzzy but fascinating video showing the proper motion of stars around an apparent black hole.
(10) YES THERE IS A DRAGON. Pete’s Dragon official teaser trailer.
(11) FARTHER BACK TO THE FUTURE. TechnoBuffalo declares “This fan-made Back to the Future prequel trailer is amazing”.
There’s never going to be a Back to the Future sequel or reboot—at least as long as director Robert Zemeckis is alive. With that in mind, what if there was a prequel? Didn’t think of that, did you? I sure didn’t, but after seeing the trailer above, I’d totally be on board.
If you’ve never seen BTTF (what’s wrong with you?), it begins with Doc Brown revealing to Marty that the only way to produce the 1.21 Gigawatts necessary to time travel is to use plutonium. The prequel would be a story about how Doc Brown gets hands on the plutonium, which he only mentions in passing in the original film.
The prequel trailer was brilliantly edited together by Tyler Hopkins, who used footage from various movies featuring Christopher Lloyd (the actor who played Dr. Emmett Brown).
(12) HE’S A MARVEL. “Stan Lee Makes a Cameo During Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 30th Anniversary Panel”. (Check out the photo at the post — Stan looks younger than Frank!)
In Los Angeles to celebrate the 30th Anniversary Edition of the book’s release, Miller sat down with IGN to talk about The Dark Knight Returns’ enduring legacy, what makes Batman relevant, and why he keeps coming back to the character. He then took the stage for a Q&A moderated by DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, where he discussed his initial apprehension at reinventing such an established character, the impact he’s had on future creators, and who would win in a fight between Batman and Captain America.
The evening took an unexpected turn right out the gate as Miller’s panel was interrupted by an audience heckler. That heckler turned out to be none other than Marvel Comics legend/cameo king Stan Lee, who was on hand to celebrate pal Miller’s accomplishments. Lee of course demanded to know who would win in a showdown between publisher mainstays Batman and Captain America, to which Miller slyly responded “Robin.”
(13) THE ICON’S IMAGE. Abraham Riesman profiles the icon in “It’s Stan Lee’s Universe” at Vulture.
A comic-book Methuselah, Lee is also, to a great degree, the single most significant author of the pop-culture universe in which we all now live. This is a guy who, in a manic burst of imagination a half-century ago, helped bring into being The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and the dozens of other Marvel titles he so famously and consequentially penned at Marvel Comics in his axial epoch of 1961 to 1972. That world-shaking run revolutionized entertainment and the then-dying superhero-comics industry by introducing flawed, multidimensional, and relatably human heroes — many of whom have enjoyed cultural staying power beyond anything in contemporary fiction, to rival the most enduring icons of the movies (an industry they’ve since proceeded to almost entirely remake in their own image). And in revitalizing the comics business, Lee also reinvented its language: His rhythmic, vernacular approach to dialogue transformed superhero storytelling from a litany of bland declarations to a sensational symphony of jittery word-jazz — a language that spoke directly and fluidly to comics readers, enfolding them in a common ecstatic idiom that became the bedrock of what we think of now as “fan culture.” Perhaps most important for today’s Hollywood, he crafted the concept of an intricate, interlinked “shared universe,” in which characters from individually important franchises interact with and affect one another to form an immersive fictional tapestry — a blueprint from which Marvel built its cinematic empire, driving nearly every other studio to feverishly do the same. And which enabled comics to ascend from something like cultural bankruptcy to the coarse-sacred status they enjoy now, as American kitsch myth.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Moshe Feder, Paul Weimer, Andrew Porter, and Michael J. Walsh for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
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Looks like Boston Dynamics is a company which could do with an up to date anti-harassment policy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35648921
@rob_matic
And that award has some stiff competition…
godstalk… gods talk… ah, if only. If only! (blows pitch pipe)
If I could talk to the Ancient Ones,
Learn all their eldritch tongues,
What a cheery chin-wag that would be!
If I could chat with the Elder Ghods
And tickle their pseudopods–
No man would be happier than me.
Why, I could trek the stars as easily as Sulu,
And summon spirits from the vasty deep
If someone said to me, my plan’s a lulu,
I’d pray Cthulhu
His soul to keep!
If I could speak like the Old Ones do,
They’d smite the lot of you
And stop your silly smirking—soon you’ll see!
If I could moan to the Ancient Ones,
Phone to the Ancient Ones,
Chant, pray and
Intone to the Ancient Ones–
And I could just
Be sure
They’d not
Be sore
At me!
@SciFiMike – 1:07 in that video marks the precise moment that the robots decided humanity must be destroyed…
@ Tasha: “But it was good to see he is over here so he can get cred at LCs by claiming he’s told us/put us in our place. ROTFL”
Reminds me of a friend of mine who, while on book tour, met his most peristent online stalker/troller. Online, the guy was incredibly obnoxious and aggressive to/about my friend, sometimes straddling the line of menacing. Then one day the troll attended a signing on this writers book tour. The troll shows up at the store, waits politely in line, give shis name to my friend (who inscribes the book), shakes his hand, and leaves.
It was a total non-event… which the troll thereafter spins online as a manly CONFRONTATION in which he REALLY TOLD OFF this writer and argued him into submission and made him cower, etc.
Trolls are always legends in their own living rooms.
@Lorcan Nagle
It goes the full circle then. There was a CGI television show of Starship Troopers that got the power armor pretty close to the book description, but had a strong anime design aesthetic.
@Camestros Felapton Tasha – sorry I didn’t point out that you’d posted the link to the groups on the council in the previous thread.
All is forgiven. Keeping up with multiple threads and hundreds of comments is hard. I’m just happy to see real facts and links being shared. It’s much harder to keep harping on nonsense when people keep posting actual facts. I’ve noticed our file770 special trolls of the day go away the sooner we provide links and information from those links. It’s something specific to file770.
@Laura Resnick Trolls are always legends in their own living rooms.
So true. Knowing he’s arguing here just so he can go claim he put one over makes him even less worth engaging.
Roughnecks? I loved that show. It was very well-written for what was nominally a kid’s show. There’s also a Starship Troopers anime, produced by Studio Nue (who also did Macross), and while the designs for the power armour are gorgeous, it really doesn’t get the story. And there’s also a CGI anime sequel to the movies from a few years ago that’s basically a 90-minute action scene, but a dmaned pretty one!
4.). The TV Batmobile was converted from a Detroit concept car, the Futura, by the customizer Chuck Barris.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batmobile#1955_Lincoln_Futura_Batmobile. .
Simon Bisson on February 24, 2016 at 6:00 am said:
Ow ow ow ow ow!
(Fortunately the mug of tea was on the desktop, not in my hand.)
It seems a while since anyone pointed out that Stand Still Stay Silent is awesome and today’s page pretty much justifies my nominating it for BGS.
I think I’m probably a Stan Lee moderate, too. I think he’s been turned into a symbol of Marvel by a lot of people for various purposes both good and bad, and that’s kind of obscured his actual career. No, he didn’t single-handedly invent Marvel, but he also didn’t personally set out to destroy Kirby and Ditko either. (Someone wiser than me once said that the only reason everyone is so outraged at Kirby’s ill-treatment is that Stan Lee never stopped promoting him and telling everyone how important he was to Marvel’s success.)
(5) NEW SAWYER NOVEL. Oh, Sawyer. I get a pang when I see his name. The first book I read of his was Factoring Humanity and I just adored it. It’s all been downhill from there. Turns out I don’t really care for his writing. (I have many angry words about The Neanderthal Parallax.)
(~) ADAM BALDWIN. I have been having lots of thoughts over the years about enjoying things by problematic people. Firefly may be hard for me to rewatch for many different reasons, but at least Jayne isn’t supposed to be a particularly likable character. If it turned out Nathan Fillion was an asshole, though…
(I was hoping to include a clip here of Nathan Fillion’s appearance in The Arrogant Worms‘ Live DVD extras. Sadly, I cannot find it on the internet. My point is Nathan Fillion seems like a pretty cool guy.)
(Mal, on the other hand…)
So true. Knowing he’s arguing here just so he can go claim he put one over makes him even less worth engaging.
The truly hilarious thing about this is that the image he’s projected here is that of a confused and bewildered racist huddled in the corner of his basement while terrified of the outside world and stroking his gun for comfort.
@NickPheas
Thank you – that’s a lovely comic.
@Dawn Incognito
Y’know, I was thinking about that a few weeks ago after watching the Expanse’s season finale, about a week after I netflixed some Firefly. One of the character’s, Amos, maps kind of clearly to Jayne, in that he’s the crew violent psycho who is occasionally sympathetic. On the other hand, The Expanse doesn’t try to make Amos “cuddly” the way that Firefly (and really, any Whedon show) made the equivalent character of Jayne.
Re-watching Firefly as someone whose work takes one into contact with violent with low impulse control men, I weirdly have much more of a problem now with Firefly making that kind of character seem cutesy. Emphasizing the apartness of the muscle kind of works better for me.
@Aaron The truly hilarious thing about this is that the image he’s projected here is that of a confused and bewildered racist huddled in the corner of his basement while terrified of the outside world and stroking his gun for comfort.
Oh come on. He’s driving around in his car stroking his loaded gun in its holster regardless of state and federal laws because he’s a confused and bewildered racist.
The 770 Percent Solution
I Never Scroll Anything Twice
@TheYoungPretender:
And that’s not even getting into how cuddly Mal is supposed to be. “He only calls her wh*re because he loves her! Awwwwww!” No. That bullshit is wrong in 5th grade and it’s wrong with adults.
I have a very complicated relationship with Joss Whedon’s stuff. More and more as I get older. I see a lot of good points that he’s trying to make, and an awful lot of privilege and selective blindness etc. I wish he would stop and listen to people when they point this out, but at this point he’s in a very big bubble.
(I have a complicated relationship with a lot of things. I just started rewatching Sailor Moon SuperS and when the villains look at the “pure dreams” of women (always women) it is incredibly rapey. I didn’t notice that when I was younger. It’s awful. My boyfriend and I are powering through by heckling the tv.)
@ULTRAGOTHA:
You only scroll twice
Or so they say
One pass for the facts
And once for the screeds…
(Sorry, just watched the latest 007 movie.)
@Dawn Incognito
I loved Firefly and Chuck, so when Baldwin went over the top, it was extremely disappointing to me. I don’t watch or support his new stuff ratings wise or financially, but I feel I can enjoy the older stuff with any issue. I feel similar to old Mel Gibson movies and the like.
He also has a clip from way back with right after he hit big with TGAGAAPP and Firefly with Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, whom he shared the stage with and did sketches numerous times while still in Calgary. It is hysterical.
[yet another ticky in the wall]
[the first one didn’t work for some reason]
[oh well]
Y’know, I was thinking about that a few weeks ago after watching the Expanse’s season finale, about a week after I netflixed some Firefly. One of the character’s, Amos, maps kind of clearly to Jayne, in that he’s the crew violent psycho who is occasionally sympathetic. On the other hand, The Expanse doesn’t try to make Amos “cuddly” the way that Firefly (and really, any Whedon show) made the equivalent character of Jayne.
The Expanse deliberately makes Amos to be a former child prostitute from the slums of Earth, damaged to the point where he needs to rely on someone else to serve as a moral compass. The whole point is that he’s not cuddly; he’s a statement about the underside of the narrative universe.
@Dawn Incognito
Totally understand on Whedon. It gets hard sometimes to revisit some old Whedon.
Just an update on Baldwin. He is still quitting Twitter and has been posting several Tweets explaining that he is quitting Twitter. Yup, it is classic troll flounce time.
@Dawn Incognito: I’ve written in the past about how once you see ‘Out of Gas’, you cannot see Mal as anything other than a terrible, terrible human being. A charismatic shit, but a shit nonetheless. I don’t have a problem with it given the body of work as one season and a movie, but I am actually quite glad that Firefly never got a Season Two, because Inara did the right thing by getting the fuck off of Serenity when she did and I don’t want a canonical romance between her and Mal.
(To clarify, since I know some people are going to be going, “Huh?”: In ‘Out of Gas’, we see in flashback the day Inara rented her shuttle. She had two preconditions that Mal agreed to–no violations of her personal space uninvited, and never call her a whore. He has never abided by either of those conditions. His whole “my word is my bond, I’m the last good man” bullshit does not apply when dealing with a woman. He does not respect her decisions, her choices, or her lifestyle, but pays lip service to respecting her as a person. In short, he’s a charismatic asshole.)
In the low circles in which I move, the usual response to an “I quit!” post is “Can I haz ur stuff?”
(Not 100% sure I’d want Baldwin’s stuff, but hey.)
The house resident Young Adult got a box set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Christmas and we’ve been plowing our way through them. There are some obvious minuses (e.g. a general lack of ethnic diversity) but it still feels like a more positive show than general and also very modern.
🙂
NO INARA DO NOT GET TOGETHER WITH MAL HE WILL TREAT YOU LIKE SHIT AND THEN GET YOU KILLED.
*ahem*
@Camestros Felapton:
I went through a Buffy rewatch recently too. I had some significant issues with Xander and his “Nice Guy” ways, but he was also portrayed somewhat as an asshole with anger issues.
I was impressed at how modern the show remains. The writing is sharp, many of the characters are well-realized, even the peripheral ones. (E.V.C. Wbanguna. *fbo*)
NO INARA DO NOT GET TOGETHER WITH MAL HE WILL TREAT YOU LIKE SHIT AND THEN GET YOU KILLED.
Signed, Wash.
The character of Inara (and the guild surrounding her) has always bothered me because she seems to fulfill a straight male liberal fantasy: that they (umm, I mean, we) could get sex from a prostitute, and not feel guilty about it, because it would be Certified Organic Fair Trade Prostitution.
Whedon does seem to have progressed since his Buffy and Firefly days, though. There’s some creepy stuff in Dollhouse, but after the first half of the first season it seems to be at least interrogating, as the lit-crit people would say, its own creepiness. And by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. we get one or two actual Asian characters with top billing!
The character of Inara (and the guild surrounding her) has always bothered me because she seems to fulfill a straight male liberal fantasy: that they (umm, I mean, we) could get sex from a prostitute, and not feel guilty about it, because it would be Certified Organic Fair Trade Prostitution.
You may be putting more thought into it than Weedon did. I’m pretty sure Inara existed to provide a contrast to the social standing held by Book.
She was also there because most classic Westerns had a dance-hall girl type character who wasn’t spelled out to be a prostitute, but in a world in which scriptwriters could have said what they meant, would have been. See, for example, Feathers in Rio Bravo.
(And today I manage to turn around 1000 words of news analysis in under an hour. If only I could write that fast all the time.)
Based on fuzzy recall I was expecting Xander to be more of an issue but I think his charcater works well. He has issues of various kinds, he does assholey things for petty selfisj rrason, he makes inappropriate jokes that hurt his friends and is…a teenager. The show doesn’t endorse his poor behavior and it has consequences and he has to repair the damage he does to his friendships.
@Chris S/@SciFiMike
1:07 in that video marks the precise moment that the robots decided humanity must be destroyed…
Yup. They will despair that our reaction to anything new is “poke it with a stick”.
I didn’t have issues with Xander–well, I did, insofar as he’s a dick, but the show seemed to recognize that early on–until S4 on, when he gets cast as The Inspirational Heart and Soul Everyman despite still being a whiny Nice Guy. Then again, S4-S6 are a long slow progression into me hating everyone except Tara and Giles, as a general rule.
The idea of ethical sex work is one I endorse in both fiction and RL. That said, Mal’s attitudes in Firefly, and particularly the fact that nobody but Inara ever seems to complain about them, do seem to undercut the “this is a legit and respected profession” conceit. And also, shut it, Mal. You’re pretty, but if that’s the quality of your opinion, maybe just keep quiet and look nice, huh?
TVTropes suggests that Firefly having a Space Hooker was an edict from Fox on the Executive Meddling page.
@Isabel Cooper: I’ve always thought it telling that the Browncoats, as a movement, were modeled on the Confederates in the Civil War–and, accusations of “meddling” aside, nobody has ever specified the specific causus belli for the war against the Alliance. Given that Mal, a die-hard Browncoat, also has the most retrograde attitude towards sex workers, I’ve always thought that there was at least a subtext that Mal was one of those people who seem nice until you actually find out what he believes in.
(Again, glad the show didn’t get a second season to prove me wrong. Also glad they never made the episode where Inara killed Reavers by letting them gang-rape her after she poisoned her vagina.)
And S4 to S6 of Buffy…ugh. S4 at least has some one-off episodes that are funny (“Spike lips! Lips of Spike! **ptui ptui ptui**”) but I can find very little of value in S5, and S6 has an overt Message From Fred that the series has lost its way. (The one where Buffy hallucinates being in the insane asylum, and her psychiatrist says, “Haven’t you noticed that your delusions this year are really boring and underplotted?” Or words to that effect.) I never really watched S7.
@John Seavey:
I thought her vagina was already poisoned and that was her Terrible Secret.
(Holy shit that’s a valid Firefly-related sentence. Dammit, Joss.)
LOL! “Hello, I must be going…”
@Dawn Incognito: I can’t look it up now, but I got the impression that the interviews conflated two separate things by suggesting they’d be revealed in the same episode–Inara would have used the syringe she took out in the pilot to booby-trap her vagina with poison, and oh god I can’t believe I’m really saying that, and in the same episode as Mal helps her recover from her trauma (because of course the only thing that would get Mal over his hang-ups about her doing voluntary sex work is getting to treat her like a victim and have I mentioned how much I hate their relationship?) we’d find out that she was dying and that was why she risked her life to kill the Reavers like that.
But again, I don’t have access to anything first hand at the moment, so I could just be separating the two ideas because I hate both of them. 🙂
…………….oh.
That’s much worse.
Thanks for the clarification.
(Is it awful that as a young woman I thought Mal was ohso charming? Yes. Yes it is.)
Took me a little too long to just edit in, but I found a link:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make
Charlie Jane Anders really took the words out of my mouth with this article. 🙂
(And Mal is charming. I think that’s one of the valuable lessons of Firefly–charming people can still be assholes.)
@Lano: Welcome, and a very good point. Stick around. Tell us what your favorite current reading is.
@Camestros: It would be irresponsible to speculate about Larry’s feelings on child abuse, simply because he’s denigrating organizations which fight against it. ARISTOTLE! right back at ya, boys.
(12) Rumors (supported by photos of him at various events in recent years, bald and in a wheelchair) allege that Miller’s had cancer and chemo. Which would explain his sudden aging. Maybe someone found the portrait in his attic.
@Greg: YOMANK.
@SciFiMike: This can only lead to Terminator.
@Kip W: I just sang that (badly) to the husband and We Are Amused.
“Roughnecks” is the best adaptation of “Starship Troopers” EVAR. We have the DVD’s. If you haven’t watched them, you should. It’s all the pew-pew fun of ST minus the tedious lecturing and fascist bits. Guys in suits taking out bugs, and some good character development (also lacking in ST).
@Seth Gordon: IIRC, Joss has little or nothing to do with the running of “Agents of SHIELD”. Which is maybe why there’s PoC and not everyone you love dies. Just sometimes. (Gevcc, jr uneqyl xarj lr.)
For those of you old enough to remember “Gunsmoke”, IRL Miss Kitty would have been an ex-hooker turned madam. But you certainly couldn’t say that on TV in the 50’s and 60’s. However, that underlying truth is why she and the Marshal never got together and just had to yearn a lot. A lawman couldn’t take up with a soiled dove.
What is it with these macho gun-lovers? They keep talking about how manly they are and all the guns they have, which further proves how manly they are. How tough and impervious to criticism they are in their right-wing rightness.
But when someone makes a mild statement questioning their POV, they start whining and throwing tantrums, and flounce off like an elderly matron with the vapors (“Why, I NEVER!”), and then don’t have the balls to stick the flounce, but come back again and again to whine some more about their hurt fee-fees.
Who’d have thought we’d actually MISS the stoic, suffering in silence type? Shane! Come back, Shane! And bring the Duke with you!
Re: Firefly
I was annoyed that Inara taking a female client was treated as a Big Deal by everyone.
Dawn Incognito: Oh, Sawyer. I get a pang when I see his name. The first book I read of his was Factoring Humanity and I just adored it. It’s all been downhill from there. Turns out I don’t really care for his writing. (I have many angry words about The Neanderthal Parallax.)
I’ve read quite a few of his books, and thought that the quality ranged from okay to good to great. But I can only attribute the Hugo nominations for Hominids and Humans to his ardent group of fans, because those books are awful on so many levels.
I read them because I’m reading all the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novels and short stories. It’s pretty much unheard-of for me to not finish an SFF book series, but I just couldn’t force myself to read Hybrids (thankfully, even his fans finally seemed to have gotten a clue about those books, because the third one didn’t get a nomination).
I’ll very likely read this new novel, but there’s no way I’m going to touch his sentient dinosaur series unless someone here whose opinion I trust can persuade me that they’re worth reading.
@ John Seavey:
I am embarassed/amused that I somehow thought that Inara was using the drug in the syringe to treat her terrifying virulent deadly crotch rot.
I was also reminded of Welcome Home Brother Charles, the hard-hitting tale of a man who got railroaded by The Man, and wreaked vengeance by killing those responsible with his magical penis.
Which raises the question, will anyone stay dead in the Marvel TV universe? I mean comics, no, but maybe when you’re working around casting then death is slightly more permanent on TV.
Of course, there’s always a return from the dead that somehow transforms the character into a new actor. We’ll call it The Darrin Device.
@Laura Resnick
The troll equivalent of esprit d’escalier, I suppose. Maybe esprit de sous le pont?