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Goth Chick News: I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This, But…

Goth Chick News: I Can’t Believe I’m Writing This, But…

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rocky-horror2No seriously, I can’t believe I’m writing this. But here goes.

I live next door to a twenty-something, just out of college couple I’ve referred to here before as “Mr. and Mrs. Disney.” Though you probably wouldn’t immediately come to this conclusion, I am truly fond of them; I just think they’re a little too cute together, and they think I’m personally responsible for knocking out Sleeping Beauty and Snow White (with a spindle and an apple, respectively).

That being said, they are generally pretty tuned into pop culture — they even attended last year’s Chicago ComicCon, along with several movie and sci-fi conventions. It is in this context that I plan to couch my mortification.

A week ago Mr. and Mrs. Disney showed up on my doorstep in a driving rain to return some borrowed items. Side-by-side as always, they stood there on the stoop sharing an open newspaper as a makeshift umbrella, and when I opened the door I couldn’t help myself. I broke out into the first verse of “There’s A Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place)” and Mr. and Mrs. Disney’s starred at me like I had bats crawling out of my ears. They asked me why I was singing to them; was it like a “Singing in the Rain” thing?

The reality of what I was facing started sinking in, but slowly.

“No, it’s just that the two of you standing there under an open piece of newspaper in the rain made you look like Brad and Janet.”

Blank stares. This can’t be happening.

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This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

This Review Is the Scene of the Crime: Inception

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inception-city-posterInception (2010)
Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger.

You expected a review of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, didn’t you? I respect Dukas and Goethe too much for that. As apparently does the rest of the nation, since over the weekend the film made roughly the amount of change found in the lint catcher of the dryer.

Inception right now is the movie conversation. No matter what else occurs in cinema during 2010 (Tron Legacy! So hyped for that), this will known as the year of Inception. Even if We Make Contact. Inception is guaranteed to become a speculative-fiction classic that will sit on the same shelf with Metropolis, Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, et al.

What? Did you think I was going to go against the grain of critical and viewer opinion that has almost cased and mounted Inception in the Hall of Fame?

I’m not. I can’t. The movie deserves every accolade it has received. I don’t even think there can possibly be a fan-backlash against it like there was with Avatar. Inception is as good as you’ve heard it is, and for many of you, it might even be far better.

But don’t walk into the theater with expectations, or even that much knowledge about it. Writer-director Christopher Nolan remained closed-mouth about the film in the build toward its premiere, which was the perfect approach. Inception isn’t exactly a “twist” movie (Bruce Willis was dead all along!), but it is a film of the constant escalation of surprise. Its story continues to plunge deeper and deeper, turning more complex with each passing scene, where the stories of most movie strip away complications as they head toward their finales. It’s a reversal that recalls Nolan’s second movie, the breakthrough Memento, but Inception is much more intricate in design. Hell, it makes Memento seem linear! Therefore, even though Inception can’t be spoiled with a single sentence the way you might spoil The Crying Game, it’s still best if you know as few details about the plot as possible or any of the specific scenes before you go in.

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Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

Torg and Marvel Super Heroes: The shared vocabulary of stories

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marvel-supers-4John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.

I didn’t play Nova, the game he and many of his friends played as a sort of long-form creative wargaming campaign. I did play, and in one case referee, long-running role-playing campaigns that gave everybody who took part a special vocabulary, a shared set of touchstones and references that (I think) acquired a particular power from being our own: our own stories, independent from the culture at large, shaped by us and our choices.

I was about seventeen when I met a group of role-playing gamers who’d created their own world for the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing system. I think the game had been going on for something like eight years at the point I met them, and it’s still going today. (Jeff Grubb has a thoughtful reminiscence on the secret origins of MSH here.)

The world, as such, was not and is not stable; it has been re-invented several times over, as campaigns and storylines begin and end (and, this being a super-hero game, occasionally lead to a reboot of the timeline in the course of play), sometimes incorporating actual comic-book characters and sometimes not, but always using many of the same heroes and villains created by our group of gamers.

The characters were, are, the essence of the game; not their histories, but their concepts, and if you played in that world you could add something to it that would become a part of the ongoing tale.

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Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

Echo Bazaar: A thing which irks me

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echo-small-image

So Echo Bazaar, the free browser game set in the Fallen London, “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell,” is a fantastic diversion. (I’ve mentioned it before.)

One of the things I love about it is that, despite its pseudohistorical goth neo-Victorian/steampunk setting (it’s like what might happen if steampunks discovered black), it’s not all that hateful about sex.

Which is a fine line with historical or pseudohistorical fantasy, right? You don’t want to be intolerably oppressive with your historical attitudes, and you don’t want to be irritatingly anachronistic by jamming in progressiveness where it doesn’t go.

And with history, at least you can rely on being accurate: with fantasy there’s a whole nother element where you have to be plausible, which basically means subscribing to historical fanon. There were black people living in Victorian London, but if what you know about it comes from seeing fifteen different versions of A Christmas Carol, you’ll probably think that the Repentant Forger is an example of unrealistic political correctness.

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Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

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theharm3TTA Press, publishers of Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave magazines as well as a few books, has launched a (potential) new line of exclusive novellas, beginning with Gary McMahon’s The Harm:

We hope that this will be the first of many TTA Press novellas, stories that you’d expect to see in Black Static and Interzone but are just too long for the magazines. They will be of varying lengths, and many we expect will be much longer than The Harm, but each one will be priced the same, just £5. In time, we hope to offer subscriptions to these novellas and offer significant savings.

The Harm is aimed at the Black Static audience, i.e., horror.  The story depicts the not unpredictable intertwined fates of three now grown up victims of particularly gruesome (though the adjective may be a redundancy) child molestation, as well as that of a sister of one of the casualties.  

The title intends to convey not just the horror of physical and sexual abuse of children (and, actually, the narrative is not, thankfully, directly concerned with detailing this) but the harm to all those who survive.

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Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

Goth Chick News: Vampires and Cat-Vomiting Noises

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let-the-right-oneIn the name of journalistic integrity, with stomach fortified by a hearty breakfast, I took myself to a Sunday morning matinee of Eclipse. I mean in all good faith I couldn’t hack on something I hadn’t seen.

But now thankfully, I can.

The theater was empty sans me and some guys sitting a couple of rows behind. In the minutes leading up to the start of the film, I overheard their conversation which helped explain why four, twenty-something men were about to sit through the third installment of the Twilight saga.

Apparently they were there solve the mystery of their girlfriends’ collective mania which had, until now, completely eluded them.

And from what I understand, they pretty much agreed they all hated Robert Pattinson just on principal.

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A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

A review of The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane

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door-into-fire2aThe Door Into Fire, by Diane Duane
Dell Fantasy (304 pages, $1.95, 1979)

Prince Herewiss of the Brightwood has two major problems.

First, he’s the first man in generations to have the Flame, a form of energy that’s much more potent than ordinary sorcery — but he can’t use it at all if he can’t make a physical focus with which to channel it.

His other problem is his lover Freelorn, exiled Prince of Arlen and trouble magnet. The summary on the back of The Door Into Fire refers to Freelorn as Herewiss’s “dearest friend” — which, in my opinion, does the book a disservice.

The Door Into Fire is about magic power, overcoming old tragedies, and the beginning of an epic kingdom-changing quest. It’s about a very hands-on Goddess and how she deals with her creation.

But it’s also about sex. Sex and love, sex and jealousy, sex in a culture where bisexuality and polyamory seem to be the default — sex that starts from a different set of assumptions than the average American reader carries around.

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The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

The Return of the Sorcerer: Falling under Clark Ashton Smith’s potent spell for the first time

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the-return-of-the-sorcerer-casConfession: I am a fan of pulp fantasy who has, until recently, read very little Clark Ashton Smith. Yes, the man who comprises one of the equilateral sides of the immortal Weird Tales triangle has largely eluded me, save for a few scattered tales and poems I’ve encountered in sundry anthologies and websites.

This past week that all I changed when I cracked the cover of The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (2009, Prime Books). As I read the introduction by legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe I knew I was in for something special: Not only was Wolfe singing Clarke’s praises (“No one imitates Smith: There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him”), but he ended with this declaration:

“Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.”

The stories that followed did just that. Smith came alive for me, and I find myself a changed man. I have trekked on distant planets, seen alien beings beyond my conception, and peered wide-eyed over the shoulders of reckless sorcerers reading from musty tomes of lore that should not be opened. I have witnessed wonders and horrors beyond the knowledge of mankind. It was a wonderful experience. Though they comprise only a small part of his body of work, the stories of The Return of the Sorcerer reveal Smith as a man of staggering imagination, considerable poetic skill, and surprising literary depth.

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Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

Goth Chick News: Do You Like Fish? Well He Likes You Too…

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jaws“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Back in March I wrote about quotable movie lines and at least in my circles, Chief Brody’s ironic statement to Captain Sam Quint ranks near the top. If you’re under the age of twenty-five you truly may not recognize it, but if you’ve made it through life this far without having seen most of Jaws, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to step away from your computer screen and go out for some fresh air.

And once you’ve done that, immediately put Jaws in the number one spot in your Netflix queue.

Thirty-five years ago, on fourth-of-July weekend, movies and the movie-going public were changed forever by a hot-shot young director and his mechanical shark.

That’s right kids, no CGI, no green-screen magic, not even a little forced-perspective puppetry. The shark was a life-sized monster, tooling around in the ocean instead of a water tank, and the actors really got wet.

Back in 1975 no one had really heard of Steven Spielberg. Besides a string of television episodes, he had only one movie under his belt: Sugarland Express, which he both wrote and directed.

However, that movie did well enough for him to be taken seriously when he asked to direct the movie adaptation of Peter Benchley’s number one best seller, Jaws.

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Goth Chick News: Boo To You Too!

Goth Chick News: Boo To You Too!

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boo2“Clowns, without a doubt.”

A few days ago I walked into a lunch conversation between my co-workers, who apparently started out discussing irrational fears their young children had.

This topic then morphed into the seemingly ridiculous fears that had followed these seemingly rational grown-ups into adulthood; not phobias per se, but “gives-me-nightmares” terrors.

The guy talking was a 30-something software engineer, and I could tell by the look on his face that he was in no way joking.

“Ronald McDonald and Pennywise are the absolute worst.”

Now, I totally get the whole “fear of clowns” thing, because clowns show up in quite a few horror movies such as IT and Poltergeist, and though the Pennywise reference did remind me that the best scenes of the otherwise fairly cheesey movie IT were indeed the ones with the murderous clown, I’m not particularly freaked out by them on the whole.

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