July 2013

SF/F Commentary

Month of Joy: “Growing Up w/ Genre and Singaporean SF/F” by Joyce Chng — @jolantru

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I grew up with genre. No, seriously, I did. It all began with a book of children’s stories complete with shape-shifting and transformation. The girl turned into a fluffy plush-tailed cat… and I was hooked. And it just kept on coming: Star Blazers (Battleship Yamato), Battle of the Planets (or G-Force), Robotech (Macross – Southern Cross – Mospeada), Star Trek and the list continued. I fell in love with science fiction and it opened a whole world of possibilities for a lonely little girl who had nobody but herself to amuse herself. That’s right: I am an only child. Then as my reading hunger grew, I feasted on epic fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons. Mind you, I was the only girl in the group of boys and I played a cleric. I explored Krynn when I bought the Dragonlance books and went on further to read Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series and so on. I thought I was the only girl reading science fiction and fantasy. I felt alone and lonely. Where in the world were the rest of my peers? Singapore seemed so dull, so empty – and I went on searching for that elusive geek girl (or nerd girl). For a while, I did find her, a good friend of mine who read the Pern series. Around this time, I had started writing. Short stories. Fan fiction (even though I hadn’t heard of this term until the Internet came about). The stories found their way in school magazines and I had people who told me I wrote well. I started topping the standard for English composition. Yet, I still felt… alone. Now, thinking back, I feel as if things are at least changing. There is a community of SFF writers here in Singapore. Trust me – they are elusive, like unicorns and phoenixes. But imagine my relief when I found them. Mind you, it felt like trawling the sea for that single needle. At the moment, Singapore SFF is slowly taking off as people find each other and their own voices.  The Singapore SFF writer seems to be a quiet breed… but we are around. When I returned from Australia after seven years of undergraduate and postgraduate study, I thought I was the only SFF writer around. That was how isolated I’d felt. Then, I found out about the Happy Smiley Writers’ Group, got involved in Nanowrimo and suddenly, they are there! Singapore SFF writers. And illustrators. And creators. And readers. This book came out of the Happy Smiley Writers’ Group! Singapore SFF started to coalesce a few years ago. Still nascent, still growing – but becoming stronger. My only hope is that it grows bigger and more prominent, that SFF writing (heck, writing) isn’t looked down upon or mocked at. Asian mentality sees writing as a job that doesn’t pay at all and I get those pointed questions from my folks who think that I am still going through a phase (and I am in my late thirties, for crying out loud). As I sit before my laptop, staring out into the nightscape, I wonder how Singapore SFF would look like in five years’ time. And then, the deeper and harder questions: Will I continue writing? Will I end up throwing in the towel and walking away? These questions hover in my mind. But at present, I am happy at what I am doing: writing. Be it wolves who walk on two legs, phoenixes who hide in human form or a human A.I who pilots a warship, I will continue to create new worlds. ————————————————— Author’s note: This post is a tribute to Han May, whose book Star Sapphire captured my attention a long time ago. ————————————————— Joyce Chng lives in Singaporean and is proud to be Singaporean. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, M-BRANE SF and the Apex Book of World SF II. She also writes urban fantasy under J. Damask. Her writerly blog exists at A Wolf’s Tale. Editor’s Note:  You can check out my mini interview with Ms. Chng for the Week of Joy feature here.

SF/F Commentary

Robotech, the Live Action Movie is Coming! Initiate the SqueeFest (Thoughts) #monthofjoy

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The Geekexchange (via The Wertzone) reports that Warner Bros. has snagged the rights to Robotech, the classic 1985 anime.  And there are some good names attached to the project: For a legion of fans that grew up on Robotech, it was fantastic news that it was previously announced that Warner Bros. picked up the rights from Harmony Gold USA to create a live action film version of the series. With big name veteran producers Akiva Goldsman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I Am Legend, Fringe (TV-series)), Tobey Maguire (Seabiscuit, Rock of Ages), and Jason Netter (Wanted, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles) all attached to the project in producer roles, the search was on for a director.  I remember watching re-runs of Robotech as a kid at some godawful hour of the morning (Saturdays!).  I was all of two-years-old when the show first aired, so I didn’t start watching until the mid-90s, when one of the local channels started showing it to nerds who had to be up at five in the morning. Later, I read several of the novelizations, including Genesis by Jack McKinney.  I’m pretty sure we picked them up at a thrift store for 25 cents each (it was the 90s, so the books had been out for a while).  The covers were super cool — giant robots and all — though I don’t remember much about them now, except that they followed the narrative of the show fairly directly (my memory about the novels and show are a tad hazy, though, as most of my Robotech experiences involved seeing things out of order — yes, I’ve seen the original Japanese versions too).*  I probably read the first three books of the Robotech novel series at least three times as a young person.  Weirdly enough, I’d completely forgotten about them until the news about the live action Robotech movie hit the web.  Strange. After the novels, I traversed into late-night Anime binges.  My grandmother discovered the wonders of satellite TV in my late teens, which meant I got to stay up late on weekends watching anime movies.  I discovered Blue Seed and a whole bunch of other anime shows that way.  One of the things that occasionally appeared at one in the morning was Robotech (specifically, Macross:  Do You Remember Love? and Macross Plus).  This stuff helped foster a love for mecha shows, including Gundam Wing, which remains one of my favorite anime shows of all time. I should also mention that while discovering Robotech, I had also spent a great deal of time playing around with old RPG source books for Battletech, another mecha franchise.  My friends and I used to use tracing paper to mix-and-match weapons on Battletech mechs, creating our own super mechs.  I still have those somewhere, along with a whole lot of Battletech toys…And then I bought a few of the Palladium RPG books for Robotech and did the exact same thing.  All of those books are still on my shelves… Basically, I was a total geek in my youth.  And I’m still a geek today, because I will go see a live action Robotech movie even if they cast gerbils for all the roles.  This is just too awesome! —————————————— *For those that don’t know. Robotech is the name of the American adaptation of the original Japanese anime franchise, Macross.  The U.S. edition took the first three series of Macross and turned them into three seasons of Robotech (this is a drastic oversimplification, though, and I’m probably half wrong).

SF/F Commentary

Movie Review: The Wolverine (2013)

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I don’t know if it is common knowledge yet, but I pretty much hated the first stand-alone Wolverine movie.  Its plot didn’t make any sense, the CG was lazy (at best), and the far-reaching story-line left much to be desired.  Almost none of those problems exist here.  The Wolverine is a high-octane action thriller with a fairly self-contained narrative, decent female characters, and a compelling, though limited, examination of mortality.  This is one you should see on the big screen! The Wolverine begins many years after the events of X-Men:  The Last Stand.  A psychologically-wounded Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) lives a mostly solitary life in the woods, desperately trying to fend off his nightmarish dreams with alcohol.  One of the dreams involves a Japanese soldier man named Yoshida (Ken Yamamura), who he saves from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.  The other dream involves none other than a mental reconstruction of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who forms the metaphorical representation of his deepest injuries:  those of the soul.  Eventually his past catches up with him:  much older Yoshida (Hal Yamanouchi) has sent one of his agents, Yukio (Rila Fukushima), to find the Wolverine to offer the “gift” of mortality in exchange for taking Logan’s gifts for himself.  But the schemes in the Yoshida household are not what they seem:  Mariko (Tao Okamoto) is set to inherent “the throne,” her father, Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), wants her out of the way, and a mysterious mutant known as Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) has managed to stop the Wolverine’s regenerative abilities in the service of her own violent agenda.  Trapped in the middle, Logan must protect Mariko, uncover the plots that seem ready to destroy her, and regain his abilities before his injuries finally catch up with him. Needless to say, a lot of people get stabbed. There are a lot of things I love about this movie, but due to space, I can’t cover them all in depth.  What I will say is this:  the film met my basic expectations.  When I came to The Wolverine, I wanted the following: Decent CG (Wolverine’s claws should actually look like metal claws) A Coherent Plot (no giant plot holes) Decent Character Development (the main folks should actually change somehow) Focus (10,000 subplots do not a good movie make) Awesome Action (good choreography and bit of gritty realism) The Wolverine offers pretty much all of these, more or less. First, I have to talk about the visuals for the film.  While the direction is perhaps somewhat uninspired (where’s some Bourne-style action when you need it?), the look of the film does not disappoint.  Bad visuals are one of my biggest pet peeves.  If I can’t believe what I’m seeing on the screen — within reason — then I cannot get into the characters whose motivations are based in part on the world in which they exist.  In the case of The Wolverine, the visuals rarely fall short of reasonably realistic, and this made it possible for me to suspend disbelief and immerse myself into the film experience.  For example, Wolverine’s claws, which spend as much time on screen as every other actor other than Jackman, are rendered so well that it’s hard to believe they’re not actually part of his hands.  The same is true for Wolverine’s injuries, which always look (and, by extension, feel) real. Additionally, the action sequences look beautiful, most notably the bullet train fight, in which Wolverine takes on several knife-wielding thugs while trying not to get thrown off the 300 MPH vehicle or get smacked by a metal arch or a billboard.  Usually fights on top of large moving vehicles are dull and repetitive.  While I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness, the climactic flying dumpster battle at the end left much to be desired.  Here, however, the stakes have been raised.  The heroes and villains both struggle to hang on to the top of the train while trying to kill one another.  This makes for good comedy, such as when Wolverine feigns jumping over a metal beam, thus smacking one of his enemies into paste, but it also makes for a fight scene that has seemingly real stakes.*  Anyone can die. Death is one of the things that makes this film far better than the Origins version.  The film explores two different dimensions of mortality:  the pain Wolverine feels at carrying the memory of killing Jean Grey within him and how discovering the possibility of death can change people.  I’ll admit that I didn’t care for the way they manifested Wolverine’s dream-sequence-Jean-Grey terrors, but I at least understand what the director/writers wanted to do.  Wolverine believes he has no reason to live, and that the root of that disinterest in life stems from Jean Grey’s death/murder.  But what he apparently has to discover by the end of the film is a different sort of purpose in life, one that involves using his powers for something greater than himself.  I don’t think the film makes this message explicit, but the last moments of the film seem to suggest, to me, that Wolverine’s rediscovery of the value of life, in part through his relationship with Mariko, represents one of the fundamental breaks from a life of killing necessary to turn Wolverine into more than his past. The other major exploration of mortality concerns Wolverine’s apparent vulnerability.  For at least half of the film, Wolverine is supposedly susceptible to the same physical pressures of any other regular Joe.  With his healing factor turned off, every attack could end his life.  In every other film incarnation of the character, Wolverine can take bullet after bullet without so much as blinking.  He doesn’t get tired.  His head never rings from a blow.  He simple grimaces and moves on.  Filmmakers have responded to this by creating villains that do bigger and badder things, which seems like a horrible slippery slope to me:  once you start doing that, you have to keep making the villains bigger.  But in The Wolverine,

SF/F Commentary

Month of Joy: “The Cardboard Robot” by Polenth Blake

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After sending my critique partner a story about people living on the clouds, he commented that all my stories had robots. I denied everything. It was about cloud people! But there it was, the main character reminiscing on making a robot out of cardboard boxes as a child. Robots had made it in there. It wasn’t based on life. I never made a robot from cardboard, because I dreamt of functional robots. Such things weren’t easily available when I was younger, so I contented myself with Asimov’s robot stories and Short Circuit (Number Five reminded me of me). Eventually, I did get a robot for Christmas (which was expensive enough to also be my birthday present). It could be preprogramed to make noises and move on a set route. State-of-the-art toy material. And obsolete by the time I hit my teenaged years, when toys like Furby were all the rage. Robots could now react in a pseudo-animal way (within limits, as the original Furby couldn’t really learn language, or remember phrases, contrary to security fears). I haven’t been disappointed as an adult. Robot toys are increasingly lifelike. Movie robots now include one with a pet cockroach (it was like the people at Pixar knew all my interests when they made Wall-E).  Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot, has made it into space. There are robots everywhere, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel bad if they’re everywhere in my stories too. ——————————————————– Polenth Blake lives with cockroaches and an Aloe vera called Mister Fingers. Her first collection, Rainbow Lights, is out in the ocean somewhere. Her website lurks at her website. P.S.:  During my Week of Joy, I mini-interviewed Polenth about her collection.  You can read that here.

SF/F Commentary

Jim Carrey, Guns, and Kick-Ass 2 (Late Thoughts)

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I said I would throw in my two-cents on this Jim Carrey story.  I realize I’m late to the party on this one, but I feel compelled to talk about the entire issue.  Instead of trying to summarize the whole damn situation, I’ll just block quote something from the Guardian: Carrey, who has been an outspoken proponent of increased gun control in the wake of the shootings by gunman Adam Lanza in December, tweeted on Sunday that he could no longer support the film. He wrote: “I did Kick-Ass 2 a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.”  Scottish comic-book writer and Kick-Ass 2 executive producer Mark Millar, whose original work forms the basis of the sequel, today responded on his own blog, pointing out that Carrey, who plays a character named Colonel Stars and Stripes, knew exactly what he was letting himself in for.  “Like Jim, I’m horrified by real-life violence (even though I’m Scottish), but Kick-Ass 2 isn’t a documentary. No actors were harmed in the making of this production! This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorsese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless bodycount of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence … Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can’t be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action movie.” While I understand Millar’s frustration with Carrey, I do think he misses the point here.  From Carrey’s perspective, film violence leads, at least in part, to real world violence.  I don’t know how recent of a development these thoughts are for him, but it is quite clear that recent events (Newtown, etc.) have “inspired” him to take a more aggressive approach to the gun rights issue (see his comedy music video, “Cold Dead Hand“).  The position is guided by a particular set of principles, which suggests that supporting gun violence in media begets violence in the real world.  Within that perspective, life is viewed a sacred, and any action which might lead to the death of others (at the hand of a gun) must be opposed.  I understand this position and even agree with Carrey on many counts.  The notion that guns are, on their own, innocuous entities is specious at best and a downright lie at worst.  There are cultures attached to them, and some of those cultures support or foment violence, whether directly or indirectly.  Some of those cultures, of course, do nothing of the sort. Millar, however, takes the position that the film is pure fiction, and that nobody was actually hurt.  That information is a given.  You can’t intentionally kill people on film without violating the law, so the issue isn’t whether people are actually hurt, but what impact the violence might have on the general public.  Carrey seems to believe that film violence — at least, in some forms — contributes to the problem of violence in our culture.  Considering how fervently he has supported the gun-restriction side of the debate in the last year, it shouldn’t surprise us that he might have problems with anything perceived as connected to that very issue.  Carrey had a change of heart.  So sue him. That doesn’t make Carrey correct, of course.  There are two positions he has taken: Guns and gun culture contributes to violence in the country Violent media contributes to violence in the country (already mentioned) These are relatively extreme positions, of course, and ones that are not necessarily supported by reality.  While there are some studies that suggest violent media increases aggression and violence, there is no scientific consensus about the issue.  Likewise, while gun culture, in my opinion, does little to curb gun-related violence, and may actually contribute to it (however unintentionally), the argument that guns themselves, or the people who use them, are directly responsible for violence is specious.  The gun rights issue is about as grey as you can get.  Any time someone tosses out European statistics to support their position, they tend to ignore the different cultural conditions and all of the examples in Europe that contradict the argument in question.  The U.S. has a different culture, geography, and history from everyone else.  Carrey doesn’t acknowledge that as often as he should, which makes it easy for people to look at him as a left-leaning soundbite machine. However, despite how much I understand Carrey’s position — let alone agree with it — I do think he has shot himself in the foot here.  His career likely won’t suffer much, but he will piss off a lot of fans — and for good reason.  He chose to take a role in Kick-Ass 2.  While I won’t say he must support the film no matter what, I do think he should take into account that everyone else involved in the production, whether actors, directors, gaffers, or what have you, may actually suffer based on his actions.  If people do refuse to see the movie, that could affect other people’s careers.  I understand the importance of one’s principles; I have principles too, and I try to stick by them as often as possible.  But you also have to think about those around you.*  Carrey may not have anticipated his change of heart — how could he? — but he can anticipate how his actions will affect others.  In fact, since his argument against guns is largely a causal one, he should understand causality quite well. Personally, I think he should shut up and donate his Kick-Ass 2 salary to an organization that represents his interests.  He can take a step back from publicity for the time being, too (if you’re heart isn’t in it, then there’s no point trying to promote something anyway — that would

World in the Satin Bag

Month of Joy: “The Joy of City Stomping” by David Annandale

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Though their heyday was undoubtedly the 1950s and 60s, giant monsters have rampaged through the movies long before and long after the era that saw the arrival of the Big Bugs, Godzilla and friends, and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion marvels. Obviously, King Kong casts his long shadow from 1933, but before him were the dinosaurs of The Lost World in 1925 (whose climax features the first city rampage), and even earlier, Georges Méliès gave us the likes of the Frost Giant from The Conquest of the Pole in 1912, and the titular Gigantic Devil in 1902. So, when all is said and done, we have had well over a century of giant monsters stomping (or, in Méliès’ case, cavorting) across our screens. Why? I’m trying to tackle the question from a particular angle, given the theme of Shaun’s site this week. What, exactly, is the joy that these creatures give us? And oh, why be coy: what is the joy they give me. They have for as far back as my conscious memories reach. I could go on about the symbolic riches they provide, such as the multiple, simultaneous readings embodied in Kong, the entangling patriarchy of It Came from Beneath the Sea’s octopus (defeated by the ingenuity of Faith Domergue), or Godzilla incarnating nuclear war in one film, enraged nature in another, or the vengeful spirits of the victims of Japanese war crimes in a third. And while it is true that these represent many of the joys I find in monster films now, they are only partial explanations. These reasons are encrustations, new pleasures that have grown on top of the old ones, but the old ones are still there. To put it another way: while I am fascinated by Cloverfield’s allusions to the first Godzilla film as a way of underscoring the big thematic concern shared by both films (the re-enactment, in fantastic terms, of very recent national traumas), there is no getting away from the fact that my biggest thrill in watching that film is the giddy excitement of seeing that monster wreck stuff. Let me put it more nakedly yet: when, in the VHS era, my brother and I were finally able to binge on all the Godzilla films, one of our primary criteria for deciding which ones were better than others was how much real estate was trashed. Monster fights in urban centres were way cooler than slugfests in the countryside (and this is a treat that Pacific Rim delivers in full during the Hong Kong sequence). So there is joy in destruction, as we have known since childhood. Isn’t this the main reason we play with building blocks? So we can spectacularly knock down what we laboriously construct? In this respect, the monster movie and the disaster film offer overlapping pleasures, but not identical ones. To focus only on the falling skyscrapers would be to miss the importance of the monster itself. It has been said (and I apologize for not recalling where I read this first), that one of the reasons children love dinosaurs so much is that they are non-threatening embodiments of power, embodiments that we first encounter when we are at our most powerless. If the power fantasies in super-heroes are ones where we suddenly have the ability to right the wrongs of an imperfect world, the monster gives us the ability to show an unfriendly world exactly what we think of it. Sometimes, we don’t want to save it. Sometimes, we just want to trample it underfoot. And that trampling is justified: with the exception of creatures such as King Ghidorah or Iris, who are the antagonists fought by the protagonist monsters (Godzilla and Gamera, respectively), the truly evil giant creature is rare indeed.* Kong, Godzilla, Gorgo, Gamera, Rodan, Mothra, Gwangi, and so on and on and on, even at their most vicious and destructive, have a core of innocence. They are more sinned against than sinning. It is telling, too, that though the 1954 Godzilla is still arguably the grimmest, most despairing giant monster movie going, and emphatically not aimed at children, it would not be too many years before the reverse would be the case, and the character had become a super-hero. The joyless film somehow leads to the infamous-yet-infectious expression of joy that is Godzilla’s dance in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965). So the joys of the giant monster films are very much paradoxical. Even in the case of the darkest films (and let there be no mistake: Godzilla is about as bleak as they come), when the fears and traumatic memories of the audience are receiving their fullest, most graphic expression, there is still that anarchic joy to be had. There is still the excitement inherent to the rampage itself. Let me close by suggesting one further possibility. The rampage almost never truly comes out of the blue.** As baffling as the monsters are for the terrified, fleeing masses, there is always a context for them. I propose that we see the creatures as examples of the Event as defined by Alain Badiou: something that a particular system cannot account for, or even imagine, but that is nevertheless a result of that system, and shatters it. Perhaps, then, at some level, our joy is the result of recognizing the monsters as necessary. They’re certainly necessary for my inner child. ————————————————— * Pacific Rim is no different: the evil kaiju are the antagonists, and while the jaegers are robots, it is significant that the opening narration refers to them as “monsters.” ** Cloverfield is an obvious exception here, in that the monster appears to have literally fallen from the sky. Its anomalous position is, I believe, a pointed one: one of the many aspects of 9/11 that the film is evoking is the confusion and terror of those on the ground in the middle of the event, people for whom, at that moment and in that place, the broader picture of why these things are happening is

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