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Author: Violette Malan

The Man Behind The Princess Bride

The Man Behind The Princess Bride

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goldman-11111“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.” Wm. Goldman

Anyone who has been reading my posts over the last few years already knows that The Princess Bride (TPB) is one of my favourite – if not my favourite – movies. Family and friends quote from it all the time. “Morons!” we’ll exclaim when faced with any, or, “Murdered by pirates is good,” we mutter as we walk away from someone who should be.

And I know there will be some who disagree with me, but I think TPB is one of the few examples where the movie is actually better than the book. And why not? They were both written by the same person, one who understands clearly what he’s doing:

Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.
Here’s another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.
Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.
— from Which Lie Did I Tell?

Which, by the way, is the perfect answer to people who complain when movies turn out to be different from books. It’s only when screenwriters fail in that last rule that they’ve done a bad job.

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Word On The Street – Toronto

Word On The Street – Toronto

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mapIn September, Word on the Street takes place in major cities all over Canada, though not necessarily on the same day. In fact, if you live in Ontario, as I do, you could conceivably participate in both Ottawa’s and Toronto’s events.

I’m sure this kind of festival happens elsewhere, but the only other place I’ve experienced it is in Spain, for the Dia National del Libro

The purpose of the festival is to celebrate the written word. All kinds of businesses and associations attend to sell and give away books, magazines, comics, etc. At first glance, however, it might look as though all this is being done without much celebration of writers. If you have a look at the map, you’ll see that there were only two sections devoted directly to writers, the “Writers’ Block” and the “Genre Zone.”

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Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

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covergame-badgeLast weekend I attended Can-Con as a Special Guest. The Guests of Honour were Eric Choi (Science), Tanya Huff (Author), Sam Morgan (Agent, JABberwocky Literary Agency), and Sheila Williams (Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine).

It’s a small con, as these things go, and as the full name of it indicates, its mandate limits it to speculative arts and literature in Canada – though I don’t think the attendees felt much in the way of limitation. There were workshops, and panels, and publishers and parties. The workshops covered building (both worlds and plots), researching the science, and  using mythic worlds. The organizers cleverly scheduled the workshops outside of the regular programming, so attendees didn’t have to choose between workshopping or panelling.
They also did something I’ve never seen before, they turned the entire con into an adventure game, where attendees who wished to could create characters, gain points by attending panels, book launches, getting autographs, etc, and then, with sufficient points, challenge monsters.

There were four tracks of panels, plus two extra tracks that covered readings, interviews, agent pitches, etc. The panels themselves covered topics as diverse as building a reading list to cultural barriers to translation, to Earth as a terraforming project, to superhero TV, to Lovecraft and Race – you know what? Check the website and go over the schedule yourself. I defy you to find an hour where there wasn’t something you would have liked to attend.

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Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?

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Norton Star RangersIt’s been my experience that Andre Norton is extremely popular among women of my generation, those who grew up reading SF when there were few women writing, and even fewer female protagonists. When I was looking at Norton’s Witch World last time, I found myself wondering whether this popularity was due to how Norton feminized her male protagonists, making them easier for female readers to relate to.

By feminizing, I mean that Norton gives her male protagonists the same kind of “otherness” that is normally associated with the female. Women have long been defined by how they aren’t men, and similarly Norton’s male protagonists are almost always defined by how they’re not the standard socially/politically accepted norm.

Even the positive qualities they may have are somehow the very things that set them apart, and define them as “other.” These are invariably qualities that the standard norm don’t wish to have, even though they’re demonstrably useful.

In Star Rangers Kartr, although a member of the Patrol, is a second class citizen, as are all of the Ranger class of combatants. In fact, he’s excluded from the class of regular Patrol in a number of ways. Even though he’s human, he’s from a frontier world, and is therefore a “barbarian”; he’s a “sensitive” in that he has certain mental abilities which can include telepathy – and it’s significant that this valuable ability is either distrusted by those who believe in its existence, or simply denied by those who don’t. Lastly, he’s a “bemmy lover”* in that he doesn’t join in excluding his nonhuman comrades from social or political status.

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The Women of Andre Norton’s Witch World

The Women of Andre Norton’s Witch World

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Witch World 1I don’t think there is any one today who doesn’t know that Andre Norton was really Alice Mary Norton, which makes her portrayal of female characters more interesting than it would be otherwise. Much of her fiction was written prior to the politicization of the feminist movement (or at least widespread public awareness of it) so it isn’t surprising that in many respects her characters reflect the traditional, male-centric, social attitudes that we would expect from that time period.

In particular we see the presentation and acceptance of women as “other” in the feminist sense, which is, stated simply, the idea that women are seen and defined not as entities and persons in their own right, but as “not men.”

The protagonist of Witch World is clearly the male human Simon Tregarth, who is transported from our plane of existence to that of the main setting of the book and its sequels and follow-ups. It’s primary world fantasy in that respect, and Simon is the “stranger in a strange land” through whom we learn about the new world.

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Time to Railroad: Still On The Train

Time to Railroad: Still On The Train

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VU1Last time I was talking about the idea of there being a time to railroad. In other words, that there’s a time when the supporting technology, or maybe just the zeitgeist, allows for a concept or invention to finally flourish. The railroad itself is the ultimate example of this idea technologically, and you can look at my last post for examples of TV or movie concepts whose time to railroad popped up in the last ten years or so.

But I also wanted to take a look at a couple of TV shows that got derailed because – maybe – they were ahead of their time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least touch on two related works, The Princess Bride, and Firefly, both of which “failed” at the time of their production, and both of which have become cult classics since. To be honest, I don’t think either of these was before their time. Above, around, beyond, maybe, but not before. Princess Bride was marketed badly – like trying to find only one shelf for a cross-genre book. The studio just didn’t know what to do with it. Firefly suffered more, I think, from lack of backbone – I mean to say, patience – on the part of its network. Either that or the audience which seems so huge to us in the Fantasy and SF community is actually quite small when compared to the population at large. Maybe Firefly would have flourished if it had been on another network, where the numbers would have looked better.

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When It’s Time to Railroad . . .

When It’s Time to Railroad . . .

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DraculaI don’t think there’s anyone in the Fantasy and SF community that isn’t familiar with this concept (I first came across it in a Heinlein novel) but just in case: There’s a point at which all the necessary components to allow for an invention to flourish are in existence, and at that point – and not before – the invention takes off.

In other words, when it’s time to railroad, everybody railroads. It explains in part why so many inventors seem to file patents within weeks or months of each other, and why so many different people are credited with being the first one to invent something.

Look at it this way, Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the invention of numerous devices he didn’t actually build and/or wasn’t able to build, because the supporting industry, or the supporting technologies weren’t yet in existence.

I want to suggest that this happens in the arts as well. Consider the vampire, as an example. For all intents and literary purposes, the vampire was invented by Bram Stoker. A few other writers showed an interest, but not much was done with the idea until the latter half of the 20th century, when it became time to vampire.

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Spider Robinson: Better a Dead Lion

Spider Robinson: Better a Dead Lion

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Robinson TelempathI’m a long-time fan of Spider Robinson’s work, and I’ve written about his Callahan’s Bar Stories and novels here, and here, but today I’d like to take a look at some of his work that doesn’t get referred to anywhere near as much.

Those of us familiar with Robinson’s work know that, even at its most humorous, it’s what you might describe as “idea-heavy.” This isn’t in the strict, hard science sense, though there’s definitely some hard science in there, but more in the social, philosophical sense.

Telempath (1983) is a post-apocalyptic thriller of the “what if?” variety, but where the end of the world as we know it comes about in a most unusual way. Sure, there was a plague, and by far the majority of the race was wiped out, but not in any expected or commonplace way. The virus that was accidentally(?) released exponentially increased humanity’s sense of smell. As a concept, it seems humorous at first – the kind of idea that people smoking dope kick around – but as Robinson shows us, if it actually happened it wouldn’t be very funny at all. For one thing, such a change would make it impossible for people to live in cities, or to support technologies that produce unpleasant odours, which is, like, all of them. Can anyone say pollution?

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And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

And In The Centre Ring: Mongo the Magnificent!

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Chesbro Horseman EdenI haven’t heard much about George C. Chesbro lately, and I don’t think it’s entirely because he died in 2008. Chesbro was one of those writers who are somehow just a little bit too extreme – in one way or another – to become widely popular. The people who like Chesbro’s stuff really like it, and the ones who don’t, are often left a little perplexed.

Take his most well-known, and certainly his most popular character. Robert Frederickson is a dwarf, with a genius-level IQ, a black belt in Karate, and a PhD in criminology. He’s also a retired circus headliner who went by the name “Mongo the Magnificent.” He got bored just being a college professor, so he became a licensed private investigator. Somehow, the cases he gets all seem to skew into the weird end of the spectrum. Go figure.

So, what was too much for you? The dwarf? The IQ? The PhD? The PI license? If your reaction to Mongo’s description is “oh come on! Really?” you might want to look at some of Chesbro’s other work. But if your reaction is more like mine was back in the day, “oh, this I gotta see,” then you might really enjoy a walk down Mongo’s dark streets. This is hard-boiled, even noir crime fiction the like of which you’ve never seen.

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Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers

Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers

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Allingham MindLately I’ve been looking at SF-like inventions or discoveries that turn up in crime/mystery novels, first with John D. MacDonald‘s The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything, and then with a variation on that same invention in an SF mystery, Spider Robinson‘s Kill the Editor/Lady Slings the Booze. This put me in mind of another example of mystery meets SF in Margery Allingham’s The Mind Readers (1965).

Allingham (1904-1966) is considered one of the mystery writers of the British Golden Age, along with Christie, Sayers, and their ilk, and her earlier novels certainly have a touch of that Jazz Age charm.

At first glance Albert Campion seems to be another variation on the gentleman sleuth with a friend on the force, a la Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey. The reader is given clear hints from time to time that he’s probably a younger son of a noble family, like Wimsey, but we never see Albert in family situations. He doesn’t live like a rich man, or a rich man’s son, and while it’s also pretty clear that “Albert Campion” is a pseudonym, we never learn his real name. Instead of the traditional English manservant, Albert employs Lugg, a former cat-burglar who’s lost his figure. Their relationship provides a great deal of the humour in the novels, but these books aren’t written for laughs. The characters may not take themselves very seriously, but they are serious about their work.

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