The Bookening: New Reads in the Abode of Awesomesauce
There are an absolutely bonkers amount of books in my house, and I’m making that even more bonkers by getting more books. The Rule of Five continues this week with a nerdy, literary, and certainly fantastic collection of additions that I’m sure will make my day…when I am able to read them! What nifty books do I have to share this time? Here they are:
Throwing Grendel to the Vikings: Reassessing a 90s Adaptation
Imagine, if you will, the 1990s. You’re making a movie. A movie that doesn’t satisfy your test audiences and requires numerous re-edits that drag your production roughly $15 million over budget. A movie whose director will be replaced by the creator of the novel you’re adapting. A movie whose film composer, Graeme Revell, will be replaced by Jerry Goldsmith. A movie starring Antonio Banderas at, arguably, the height of his popularity. A movie that Roger Ebert will pan and which will bomb so horribly at the box office that fuzzy studio math puts it as the #32 or #1 worst box office flop in history (adjusted for inflation). A movie with so many production problems that it caused Omar Sharif to temporarily retire from acting (1999-2003). In Sharif’s own words: I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.” IMDb (2003) If you imagine all of that and think it’s just not possible that this movie could be shockingly pretty darn good, well, you’d be wrong. You see, the movie in question is The 13th Warrior, based on Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1977)(itself a loose adaptation of Beowulf and the historical writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). And The 13th Warrior, I’m here to say, is surprisingly good in a campy “full of heart” sort of way. Why? I’m glad you asked.
Pondering the Editors Behind Our Fiction
Yesterday, I received an advanced copy of Subterranean Press’ new anthology, Edited By. The book collects notable works of short fiction that have been, well, edited by Ellen Datlow, one of the most notable short fiction editors in the world of SF/F/H. It’s a beefy book full of stories by some incredible writers, including Elizabeth Bear, Ted Chiang, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and many others. Part of what interests me about this book is the concept behind it and the way it highlights the weird imbalance of awareness about editors in publishing. It is comparatively easy to collect work edited by one short fiction editor than it is to do the same for novel editors. Short fiction editors also seem, in my opinion, much more visible, perhaps because they work with so many authors at a time (a benefit of the short format) than their novel-editing peers. This makes it rather easy for us to recognize the work editors do even if we don’t actually know what it is that they do.
Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)
As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes. In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which feature snakes of any kind because almost all of them get nearly everything wrong and most of them use snakes as plot devices for fear. There are a lot of problems with the way snakes are portrayed in SF/F/H, especially film. The biggest, however, can be summed up in these three points:
Film Challenge: 10 Underrated SF/F Films (1999-2019)
I have once more (and a very long time ago) been challenged by Ian Sales to join him in our un-named war to come up with the best arbitrary list of films within an equally arbitrarily selected category. You can find previous iterations of this absurdity here, here, here, here, and here. We have, alas, not done this in a long while, which we can both blame on being busy with many other things. But in the interest of rekindling silliness, I have been loosely challenged by Ian to come up with a list of 10 underrated SF/F films from the last 20 years, which is a direct response to this ScreenRant list. Since this list is in response to a link with a remarkably open prompt, I’ve opted to stick to the 10 item list format. Future challenges will go back to our favorite number: 5.
Five Faves: SF/F/M Movies or Shows I Love Because of My Grandma
A little over a year ago, we lost my grandmother, Merle Crawford. She was a quirky and jovial lady. The kind of person who could meet anyone at a grocery store and turn a chance encounter into a meeting between old friends. You can read a bit more about her life in the obituary I wrote for her in the Mountain Democrat, the local newspaper for Placerville, California. One thing that I often mention about my grandmother is the impact she had on me as a geek. While I certainly watched a lot of genre programming as a kid,1 there are two things that led to my passion for SF/F (and related genres): My mother giving me VHS tapes of Star Wars. The ones with Leonard Maltin’s interviews with George Lucas at the front. My grandmother’s insistence that I watch certain programs. So to celebrate the massive influence my grandmother had on my life in a very specific way, here’s a list of 5 SF/F/M (for mystery) movies and TV shows I love because of my grandma: Let’s be real. A lot of programming for kids is genre TV by default. G.I. Joe and TMNT are both SF/F. Dinosaurs is fantasy. Winnie the Pooh is fantasy. Most Disney films are fantasy. DuckTales is SF/F. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and The Secret World of Alex Mac and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are SF/F. A lot of programming for kids also falls under the mystery umbrella. I just don’t think I ever thought about genre when I was a kid. Looking back? It almost seems inevitable that kids born in the 80s and 90s would turn out to be unintentional SF/F nerds in the 2010s. ↩