Starship Merlin

What do spoilers spoil?

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:05:19 -0400

In his New York Times blog Stanley Fish argues that being spoiled cannot ruin a good piece of entertainment, only a poorly constructed one. Having spoiled the end of the Hunger Games books for his readers, he tries to argue that doing so would not ruin the “suspense” of the story.

The suggestion is that there is a trade-off in the pleasures available to first-time readers or viewers on the one hand, and “repeaters” (as they are called in the scholarly literature) on the other. First-time readers or viewers, because they don’t know what’s going to happen, have access to the pleasures of suspense — going down the wrong path, guessing at the identity of the killer, wondering about the fate of the hero. Repeaters who do know what is going to happen cannot experience those pleasures, but they can recognize significances they missed the first time around, see ironies that emerge only in hindsight and savor the skill with which a plot is constructed. If suspense is taken away by certainty, certainty offers other compensations, and those compensations, rather than being undermined by a spoiler, require one.

Generally, this is true. The Lord of the Rings is no less enjoyable the tenth time you read it than the first. In fact, it gets better the more times you read it, even knowing Frodo and Sam are going to survive and Sauron will be defeated. Even suspenseful films, like Psycho are not necessarily only watchable one time. After 70 years Citizen Kane is still considered one of the greatest films of all time, despite the fact that everyone, even those who have never seen it, knows the ending.

But no one really argues against spoilers solely because of the suspense. Pulp fiction that will be consumed once and forgotten might rely exclusively on suspense to keep the reader moving forward, but any film or novel that will be remembered is a mixture of suspense, characterization, world building, and dozens of other things. Great entertainment is more than suspense.

So then why are spoilers wrong? Not because they ruin suspense, but because they take control away from the individual. If in the course of a conversation you reveal a spoiler to me, you have decided what I should and should not know. You have taken the right of discovery away from me without my consent.

Spoilers will not ruin most popular entertainment. There’s really no suspense to Star Wars, you know Luke is going to take out the Death Star. You know Harry Potter is going to defeat Voldemort. But it should be up to me whether I have those endings spoiled or go into a first viewing knowing nothing.

Certainly a writer for the New York Times shouldn’t decide that for me.

How Do You Respond to Racism in Older Scifi?

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:21:17 -0400

The other day on io9, Charlie Jane Anders asked a very good question: what do you do when you encounter racism in old science fiction books?¹ Do you grit your teeth and just move, knowing the writer lived in a different time and such things were culturally acceptable? Or, do you toss the book aside and read more modern, racism-free literature?

The majority of commenters, and most people I talked to about it, agreed that while racism is vile, there’s nothing you can do about it in old literature. You must simply accept it and move on; while we can certainly disagree with the author, railing against them is much like fighting windmills.

As the reasoning goes, if we shy away from older stuff that might not be “politically correct”² we’ll not only miss out on great entertainment, but we’ll also do ourselves harm by being sheltered.³ A good amount of furor is raised when publishers try to remove the offensive parts of Huckleberry Finn, which we all acknowledge as an important piece of literature, so why should we ignore or whitewash our science fiction?

Initially, I found this argument actually quite persuasive. I mean, I really like H.P. Lovecraft, so why should it matter if he was personally a terrible racist who only occcasionally allowed that to creep into his works?⁴ Doesn’t the good outweigh the bad? But when I posed the question on Twitter, @eatingwords brought it all into perspective:

@frizz Unless their racism impinges directly on their work I ignore it and go on. Admittedly, I might think differently if I was a minority.
— Jeremy (@eatingwords) March 20, 2012

Of course I have no problem with racism in old scifi and fantasy, I’m not the target. I can read over that kind of stuff because a white guy wrote it about other people, not me. When I think about what it would be like for a person of color to read something like that, well, it becomes harder to justify my enjoyment of it.

So, let me propose a thought experiment. Suppose a writer, let’s make him a black man, maybe a professor at Harvard, wrote a story about aliens coming to Earth and promising to give unlimited wealth and technology to humans. Sounds great, right? But there’s a catch: Earth has to give up all of its black people in exchange. The twist: they do it, of course.

Now, suppose such a story did exist. Would white people be comfortable with it? Would white people feel that it was racist and didn’t represent them properly? Or would white people read the story, grit at the crap they didn’t like and move on?⁵

We could also add misogyny to this, but I think that should be a separate post. ↩
And, of course, by “not … politically correct” I mean racist. ↩
Think about it, do you really want to miss out on watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Gone With the Wind? You’d be out of the loop, culturally illiterate. (Or, at least if you’re of a certain age. I’m certain my kids won’t know about Gone With the Wind unless I make a point to show it to them. Which I probably won’t.) ↩
See this article for more on Lovecraft’s racism. ↩
Of course, such a story would never exist and white people (specifically conservatives) would never object to it. ↩

Slavery and the Fate of the Jedi

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:53:00 -0400

In the last post, I looked at a fundamental question the Fate of the Jedi series began with but quickly abandoned in favor of the status quo.¹ Reading only that post would give the impression that I dislike the series, or at least that I find nothing of value in it, but actually there are a number of very good things about Fate of the Jedi.

One of those very good things is the abolition movement that spreads through the galaxy, fueled in part by holonet reporters.² This seems fitting, as there has been an evolution of the galaxy, from a oligarchy run by nobles and Jedi to a democratic society with journalists, military leaders, humanitarians and Jedi all vying for power. The slavery depicted in The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi doesn’t really have a place in this new science fiction setting.

After a revolt is foiled, slavery becomes a hot-button topic, with many reformers wondering how the GA can be a legitimate government if it tolerates slavery within its member planets. Slavery is antithetical to democracy and the government can’t speak authortatively on any issue if it also supports slavery (even if implicitly).

This brings up all sorts of very interesting questions: How can a weak central government force member planets to abolish slavery? Since slavery is so important to the economies of these planets, is it even possible to abolish it? What happens if they refuse, can they be sanctioned? Kicked out of the Alliance? Would the slavery bloc of planets form their own competing confederation?³

The very real political issues come head-to-head with the Jedi, who don’t care much about the politics of the situation, they just want to see people freed from bondage.⁴ This puts the Jedi at odds with the government, and brings up more questions of authority and accountability. In this case, the Jedi are right and the GA is wrong, but the conflict leads to an armed showdown at the Jedi Temple where Mandolorians are brought in to kill Jedi.

All of this is very good. The various authors go to great lengths to show that slavery is not a simple problem that can be solved by chopping someone’s arms off. There are very real reprecussions no matter what the government decides to do. It’s messy, something a hero on a quest can’t solve in a few hours.

But then my old complaint with Fate of the Jedi rears its ugly head: the storyline is completely dropped. The slavery issue serves a purpose, to bring the Jedi and GA together for a fight, and then disappears completely. A few planets decide (or, are forced to decide) whether slavery is important enough to fight a war over, but the galaxy-wide problem is never really addressed.⁵ Perhaps the next series will deal with it, but it seems more likely that it will disappear from the EU for a while, only to return with a single line that says “Oh slavery, that was outlawed a long time ago”.

UPDATE: I’m pretty sure I was right. At the end of Apocalypse, there’s mention of a couple Jedi helping the slaves start democratic societies. It’ll never be mentioned again.

For the record, my argument was as follows: the series began by questioning how a democratic society could allow the Jedi to operate with little to no accountability, seeing as how they are beholden only an invisible, mystical Force. This was a great question, mainly because it resonates with the science fictional setting and our ideas of what a futuristic liberal society would look like. The series basically answers that question by making the leader of the Galactic Alliance a crazy fascist, the compromising moderate leader of the Jedi insane, and the Jedi the only ones who are able to see the terrible threat mere mortals are blind to. ↩
SPOILER ALERT. Of course, as the story makes clear, the Freedom Flight was created and funded by an Imperial who hoped to topple the Galactic Alliance and take over, but most of the individuals who made up the organization knew nothing of that and were actually doing good work. ↩
With the Hutts being the largest group of slave owners in the galaxy, a confederation of slave-owning planets would be a big threat to the Galatic Alliance. ↩
Seeing as how the Jedi were almost completely wiped out by a kid who was really pissed about being a slave, we can understand their viewpoint here. ↩
Also, the issue of droid slavery is not addressed either. There are a few paragraphs inserted for humor, but the idea that droids are essentially artificially sentient beings is never brought up. This seems ripe for a good EU exploration. ↩

The Big Question in Fate of the Jedi

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:14:00 -0400

This week the final book in the latest Star Wars series, Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse, hits store shelves, which should make a few thousand people happy.¹ I haven’t had time to read, but I’m sure I’ll put a review once I’ve finished listening to the audiobook.

The Fate of the Jedi series has been fairly disappointing for a lot of reasons. The characters are uninteresting, the plot has failed to delivered on its promise, and it has, so far, pretty much failed to advance the universe in any significant way. The gold-standard in universe-shaking series is, of course, the New Jedi Order, which redefined the Star Wars EU going forward, created (and killed) memorable characters, and proved that a massive, multi-volume series could work. It seems the Star Wars team has spent the past ten years trying to recreate that phenomenom, but what they’ve done has never been as good.

In the beginning, Fate of the Jedi seemed to be full of promise and excellent plot ideas: Luke Skywalker (and, by proxy, the entire Jedi Order) is blamed for Jacen Solo turning to the dark side and is exiled from Coruscant; he’s not even allowed to communicate with the Jedi.² Luke, along with his son Ben, decide to take to the stars in their luxury spaceship³ and find out what really happened to Jacen Solo to cause him to turn to the dark side.

The first book asked a lot of good questions, but chief among them was one asked by Admiral Daala: How can a modern, liberal, democratic society function when it is ruled by theocratic warriors who are accountable to no one but a mystical Force? Daala is the bad person in this series, so naturally her question is unimportant and destructive for the Alliance.⁴.

But let’s face it, it is a good question. If we lived in the galaxy far, far away we would ask the same question. Why are the Jedi allowed to run around chopping people’s arms off with impugnity? There is no way to scientifically analyze the Force⁵, so the legitimate government must take the Force-user’s word for it. The argument basically boils down to “God told me to do it”. There is no way in the 21st century we would accept that as a legitimate reason to kill someone.

But of course we don’t live in the GFFA. The residents of that galaxy have a history with the Jedi and magic that we simply don’t have. So it must be easier for them to accept the role of a mystical force, right? Well, if we look at the history of the galaxy, it seems rife with examples of Force users wrecking the crap out of things and getting away with it. In fact, during the Fate of the Jedi series there is a Jedi on the Council, Kyp Durron, who once destroyed an entire planet of a billion or so inhabitants and was never charged as a war criminal.⁶

And in this case, it does seem quite reasonable to not understand the difference between Jedi and Sith; they’re the same thing, only philosophically a little different. The wall separating the two seem quite permeable, so much so that Force users seem to come and go at will, escaping punishment for crimes committed under the influence of evil.⁷

The question Daala asks creates a potential turning point for the Star Wars universe. Is it a fantasy or science fiction series?⁸ Does Star Wars represent a conservative viewpoint, one that respects ancient traditions and ways of life or is it about modernity and the undoing of the more barbaric elements of our past? Fate of the Jedi had the potential to move in a forward direction, to show that just because the Jedi have always existed without accountability does not mean they have that right in perpetuity. Unfortunately, the story proceeded to demolish Daala’s argument and prove that Jedi are always right and that if the legitimate government does not bow to their supremacy, they will be put aside.

I’m not sure how the series will end, but based on the previous eight books it will be disappointing. The larger questions of the series will go unanswered in favor of more pointless plotlines.

The demand for this series seems to be very low, even worse than the last series, which was pretty bad. ↩
On the face of it, this is a pretty dumb punishment. In a galaxy of literally hundreds of millions of planets, Luke isn’t allowed to step foot on one of them. Sure, it is the center of the galaxy, but it’s a lot like me being banned from New York City. I think I might get by because I can GO ANYWHERE ELSE I WANT. It’s not like he was forced to live on Hoth or something. ↩
Again, not a bad deal. He has the equivalent of a luxury RV that he can take anywhere he wants. That he chooses to go to some pretty terrible planets is his decision. He could’ve gone to that one planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where it’s always Saturday afternoon on the beach, Saturday night in the town and Sunday afternoon in the hotels. ↩
It also doesn’t help that Daala becomes quite unhinged and creates a fascist state. ↩
Midicholrians notwithstanding. ↩
Sure, they were at war and he was allegedly under the control of a Sith ghost, but that goes right to my point. A modern, rational society would reject the war defense as baseless (was he a commissioned soldier?) and would, in my opinion, reject the Sith ghost defense as insanity. Regardless, he would/should have been locked up. That he was really, really sorry would play no part. Assuming they have better technology than we do, perhaps Durron could have been rehabilitated. ↩
And even this argument is somewhat undercut by the major philosophical difference between Luke and Jacen. Luke, taught by Obi-won and Yoda, believes in the existence of a semi-personal evil Dark Side. Jacen, taught by the Sith (?) Vergere, seems to believe only in the Force and the will of the individual. The latter view seems more in keeping with what we actually see in the films (as opposed to what the unreliable characters tell us; remember, they lie a lot). There is no light or dark side, there is only the Force and the user decides whether to do good or evil. The boogeyman known as the Dark Side is a fantasy told to impressionable Padawans. ↩
While most people seem to think of Star Wars as science fiction, it is in fact a work of fantasy. While this is not really an argument I want to get into, but it seems the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy is the existence of magic. Star Wars and Dune take place in futuristic science fictional universes, but everything in the stories centers on magic and not science. Star Wars could be called sci-fi, which seems somewhat different from science fiction, but again, science is not a concern, magic is. (As an aside: a movie like Independence Day could be called sci-fi, as it has space travel and aliens, but it isn’t proper science fiction because there is no plausible science in it. But it isn’t fantasy.) ↩

Book Review: Robopocalypse

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:43:22 -0500

Following in the footsteps of World War Z, Robopocalypse is a “found footage” novel¹, a work of fiction that reads more like non-fiction. It is the literary equivalent of Cloverfield, Chronicle, or Paranormal Activity.

The story follows humanity’s struggle to fight a war against robots that have risen up against their creators. For the most part, the main characters are the American soldiers that make up Bright Boy Squad, a group that comes out of Boston, travels to Oklahoma, and finally takes the fight to the AI overlord Archos in Alaska. Additionally, there are characters as diverse as Taliban fighters, Japanese factory workers, and Osage Native Americans.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

On the whole, this book is decent. It is well-written, its characters are memorable, if not very well developed, and the conclusion, though perhaps a bit predictable, is satisfying. In short, it is everything you could want in a robot uprising story. But there are many things missing that prevent it from being a great book.

First, let’s start with what the book gets right. The robot leader Archos, called The Big Rob by the humans, does not go about things the way a usual villain might. In a traditional story, the robots emerge fully formed, ready to fight the humans. They already have all of the weapons they will need and are perfectly suited to fight humans wherever they find them. In Robopocalypse, however, the robots follow a more natural progression. After Archos escapes its containment cage, it attacks humans by any means possible. Computer-controlled cars hunt down and smash people, elevator doors open and cause people to fall down long shafts, and robot servants use hands built for holding things to strangle. They are not always successful and, indeed, are sometimes easily thwarted by humans.

Early on, one of the main characters, an Osage sheriff named Lonnie Wayne Blanton, takes his people up on a high hill where the robots simply cannot reach them. It is not until much later that the robots adapt to climb the steep hills to invade the stronghold. In another case, the humans who remain in New York City destroy buildings in order to create uneven terrain the robots cannot walk on. Again, it takes them time to adapt to the new ways people are fighting.

Each group uses the skills they possessed before the uprising to fight in their own particular way. A computer hacker fights in the way he knows best, a construction/demolition duo in their way, and the soldiers and Osage differently. Until the very end, none of these groups can be said to be organized in any sense of the word, nor do they need to be. In the end, disorganization is beneficial to fighting a hive mind.

In this way, the bad guys as well as the good guys are always learning. The humans figure out fairly quickly that life is never going to be the same, that they need to stop killing each other and fight the common enemy. So, they change the way they fight and do things that would previously be considered wrong, like destroying your own city in order to win. On the other side, the robots change based on what the humans do. Move up a big hill, create robots with four legs. Learn to take out legged fighters from trees, create slithering robots. Then, the humans take the new robots and create their own weapons out of those. It’s a chess match between two fairly even opponents.

The imbalance between the two comes in terms of what each side wants. For the humans, the only acceptable end is to survive. When the robots initially attack, and in the months and years that follow, millions and perhaps billions of people die. They are faced with a possible mass extinction of the human race. Knowing that, they understand that victory must come by pretty much any means necessary. Cities can be rebuilt, technology can be remade, even animal life can be brought back from extinction, but human life can never be allowed to die out.

The robots have no such luxury. From the beginning, they are not interested in wiping out all life on the planet in order to rule. In fact, there are times that Archos seems convincing in its desire to wipe out most of humanity in order to save the planet. It’s up to the reader to decide whether it is lying or not, but the robots do seem interested in preserving the natural world that humans have destroyed.

This is one of the best things about the book, the bad guys are not completely evil, neither the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica nor the aliens of Independence Day. If you take their word for it, they are the protagonists, fighting for Mother Earth. Of course you probably shouldn’t take their word for it, but that’s beside the point. What they seem to want to do is return the planet to some kind of balance, however they would define the word.²

Despite being a genre book, which in many minds is synonymous with bad writing, there are chapters that are absolutely riveting. While I believe the point of the book is to be more passive and clinical rather than artistic, the writing is on the whole very good. A few chapters still stick out in my mind as being exceptional examples.

The first is the chapter titled ‘Tickler’. In it, a Senator awakes in a field not knowing where she is nor how she got there. She figures out she was a prisoner of the robots and was let go for some reason. Running into some survivors, she finds that she has been bugged by the robots; they let her go on purpose so that she would lead them to other humans. The survivors won’t help her.

The Senator makes the arduous journey back to the labor camp in order to find her kids. It is surprisingly easy to get in, but less so to actually get out. She finally accomplishes this, but at the expense of her own life. In the final, haunting paragraphs, she pushes her children over a fence and yells at them to run away. They escape, but she dies. (In a way, this chapter reminds me of the first chapter of Justin Cronin’s The Passage, one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read.)

Pretty much any chapter with Mathilda, the Senator’s daughter, is good. She is one of the first to notice the robot’s sentience, and she is the one who finally organizes the American resistance. She also is a hybrid robot-human, having been given the ability to see beyond what normal humans can see. If the whole book would have been about her, I would have been happy.

Early in the book, there is a chapter titled ‘Roughneck’, written as a series of letters from a drilling supervisor to his wife. The man has unwittingly been hired by the robots to drill a hole in Alaska where Archos will eventually make its home base. He begins cheerily, happy with the money they will make. As time progresses, he realizes there is something very wrong with the job. Men are getting sick, some are losing their minds, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone coming to pick them up. The descent into madness and hopelessness, which comes before the general uprising, foreshadows what will happen to almost everyone in the months and years to follow.

This does not mean, however, that Robopocalypse is a perfect book. It is far from that. There is a lot to like, the premise alone was almost enough to get me through it all, but there is also a lot that just doesn’t make sense. There were times when I questioned that maybe I didn’t understand the genre, or that the structure was too odd for me, but I really think there are serious structural and thematic problems that need to be addressed.

The biggest problem is that narrative threads are only seen in short bursts, picking up later only after significant events have occurred off-stage. Towards the beginning of the book, the Osage town in Oklahoma is set up as the center of organized military resistance against the robots. Initially, they just go up the hill because strategically it’s a good place to make a stand. Over time, however, it becomes something of a Mecca for surviving humans. It is talked about by the narrator, who is writing after the war, in near-legendary terms.

The problem is that the reader never actually sees how it became so important, we are merely told it is. The humans go up the hill to hide, the humans find a way to kill the robots, and suddenly it is a huge city with refuges from all over the place. Then the city on a hill is never seen again.³

This, of course, brings up a whole slew of questions. How did the elders deal with an influx of white refugees? At one point there is a gang problem, how did that come about? How did people hear about the city and how did they get there without being killed? Why did people want to go there? While not all of these questions could or should have been answered, for the story to basically ignore all of them seems unreasonable.

Another plot line that takes wild leaps is the story of Takeo Nomura, an older Japanese man who has a special talent. When we first meet Mr. Nomura, it is through the eyes of his co-workers. He is a strange man, never meeting anyone’s eyes. He lives with a robot, and not even a sexy robot, just an old woman robot.

His mere existence seems to bother the younger men, so they pull a prank on him, causing his robot lady-friend to embarrass him in front of everyone. In a stunning coincidence, the exact moment they choose to make a fool of Mr. Nomura is when the robot uprising begins. The old man is attacked by his lady and the other men deactivate her.⁴ She cannot be rebooted for fear she will attack again.

Mr. Nomura seems to possess some sort of power over robots. When he speaks to them, some of the time, they obey him. It is never explicitly stated where this power comes from, but over the course of the novel he uses it to build up an army in the factory that successfully defends against Archos.

Naturally, such a place would become a haven for humans, so Mr. Nomura takes people in and protects them. Archos fights back, but soon learns they cannot win. Instead, it gives Mr. Nomura a choice: if he opens up his gates and gives up, his lady-robot love will be restored to him, obligation free.

What happens next is still unclear to me: Mr. Nomura rejects the offer, but also activates the lady-robot. She does not attack anyone; instead, she sings. Her song, or whatever, breaks the connection the robots have to Archos and sets them free. This has far-reaching implications for the story, but Mr. Nomura, his love ‘bot, and Japan as a whole are never mentioned again. They serve their purposes plot-wise and disappear into the background.

Questions the reader may have, like “How the heck did he have the power to force robots to obey him?” or “What’s the deal with her song?” are never answered. Most readers would not expect all questions to be answered, certainly a bit of mystery is important, but the resolution to Mr. Nomura’s story feels more like a deus ex machina than a reasonable narrative.⁵

I am not arguing that the author should have included every single detail. Outside of epic fantasy, this is not reasonable. The reader is expected to use their imagination. However, I am arguing for characters who are real, who exist for more than just advancing a single plot line. While the author is using the conceit of a non-fiction work, readers will still expect it to have a logical consistency.⁶

Another problem I had with this book is that it seems to miss so many opportunities to explore interesting themes. The thing that makes science fiction so great is not the giant robots, the gun-toting heroes, or the spaceships; what makes science fiction great is the exploration of the human condition through awesome technology and larger-than-life characters.

Towards the end of the book, the main characters run into robots that have been freed from Archos’ control.⁷ They want to join the human soldiers and fight their former master/oppressor. After an understandable fight, the two forces join together and despite some tension actually work well with each other. In the end, it becomes obvious the two sides need each other. There are things the robots can do the humans cannot and vice-versa.

Although not extensively, the story does deal with the difficulty faced in merging a robot and human army. The humans do not trust the robots, and almost until the end they’re waiting for a betrayal. The robots, for their part, do not understand the humans and seem to consider them quite stupid.

All of that is good, it’s what the reader would expect from such a book. What isn’t good is the way the freed robots deal with Archos. This kind of thing is ripe for exploration. These robots owe their sentience to Archos, and even though he designed them to kill humans, he is something like their god. They were enslaved by Archos, but without him they would not have the ability to be free. These issues are never explored, nor do the freed robots really confront their creator.

There is a brief confrontation in which Archos takes the Satan role and attempts to cause the freed robots to “fall”, but it really is rather brief. The attempt is rebuffed and the war is won. But for this scene, the freed robots never contend with Archos, they are never forced to come to terms with their sentience.⁸

Robopocalypse also drops the ball when it comes to dealing with human nature. There is an excellent chapter early on when the main characters who would form Bright Boy Squadron come to an Army base, only to discover the Army has given up and abandoned civilians. A large refugee camp surrounds the base, but the soldiers will do nothing to help the people. In fact, they seem rather hostile to anyone who has never been a soldier.

What was it like for the soldiers to deal with the robot uprising? How many survived? How did they deal with a large influx of civilians who wanted, needed, their protection? How did they fight the enemy while also fighting gangsters, thugs, the sick, and an almost total lack of provisions? Again, the book does not even really seem interested in exploring this for more than a few sentences.⁹

The final theme that was overlooked, the most egregious, is that of the relationship between humans and hybrids. Early in the book a character encounters a man whose arm has been replaced by a robotic apparatus. The character comments in his mind that the young man must have suffered at the hands of other humans who did not take kindly to human-robot hybrids. Not being that kind of bigot, however, he accepts the young hybrid with no argument. He even brings him to their hideout, without even questioning whether the kid was a spy or had some kind of tracking device.

Later on, these same characters meet Mathilda and accept her unconditionally, even when she seems ready to kill them because they cannot help her brother. What happened in between? How did the survivors deal with these hybrids when they first encountered them? Why were some willing to help them while others apparently shunned them, leaving them to die? Why would it be unreasonable to be very wary of people that had been changed by the robots?

The reason I think this is the most egregious theme to leave unexplored is because this is the plot line that has the most potential. The events of the book represent a watershed; before the uprising, humans believe themselves to be the masters of Earth, even to the point of “enslaving” robots. Humanity fundamentally changes after the uprising, however. They must recognize they are not alone in the galaxy, nor are they the only sentient life on Earth. After the war, they must learn to live with the knowledge they brought all of it on themselves, and now must learn to live with the freed robots.¹⁰

The hybrids represent a third way, a middle path between the cold logic of the robots and the unpredictability of the humans. The hybrids are a part of both worlds, able to bridge the gap and help create the new society that will inevitably emerge from the ashes of the war. At most, though, the hybrids are a deus ex machina so the humans will have someone as powerful as Archos. There is zero exploration.¹¹

This, ultimately, is the problem with the book. It presents wonderful ideas but never really follows through with them. It brings in characters full of potential, but never fully articulates who these people are and why they do what they do. The situations are ripe for great storytelling, but by the time things get interesting, the story has moved along.

As I’ve written more than once, my problem with Robopocalypse is that it isn’t the book I wanted it to be. That I don’t like it, then, is only partially my fault. I should simply accept the book on its own terms and not fault it for what it is not. I understand this. However, the book really does have some major flaws and if it had explored a few of the themes in more depth, it would have been a good book. Properly executed, a book like this has the potential to be a great book.

Science fiction has a wonderful way of making us see our world through the lens of the fantastical.¹² We are able to think about racism differently because of Star Trek. Dune makes us consider the dangers of fanaticism in religion. The conflict in The Forever War gives us insight into the endless Vietnam War. And so on. When properly executed, science fiction as a genre will take something complex and put a new spin on it, allowing us to see the problem with fresh eyes. Robopocalypse had the potential to be that kind of book, but fell very short of the mark.

Is there an official name for this kind of book? ↩
In this respect, the robots are more like the mysterious aliens in the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. They want world peace, but they’re trying to get it at gunpoint. ↩
The “City on a Hill” is actually a very good metaphor, used to great effect. Historically, we know that anglo-Americans have used the City metaphor to refer to America as the city of God, shining light into a dark world. In this case, the City is repurposed as a Native American city, a place never defeated by the Army, that brings the light of hope to a devastated human world. It’s a great reversal. ↩
While I would prefer to call the robots all “it”, it becomes to difficult to not anthropomorphize them. A robot designed to look like a lady would naturally be thought of as a woman. ↩
Other plot lines that jump around include the journey of the Bright Boy Squadron across the United States and the story of Specialist Blanton in Afghanistan. In the case of the former, the soldiers are legendary before they arrive in Oklahoma, but we are never given any clue what made them so famous. What did they do between Boston and Oklahoma? How did they learn to fight the robots so well? How did they gel as a team? Specialist Blanton, son of the Osage police officer, witnesses the first robot revolt, makes a startling discovery, then disappears from the scene. As with the other examples, he seems to exist merely as a plot device, not an actual character. ↩
And this, I believe, may be the crux of the problem. While I didn’t read this book expecting it to be a traditional story, I did expect it would actually make sense. A work of non-fiction could conceivably have characters pop in and out to serve their purpose and never be heard from again, but the reader would inevitably grow tired of the editor’s strong arm. The reader wants to experience the entirety of the story, not the highlights. ↩
I think they were freed because of the singing lady robot’s song, but I’m not entirely sure. I kind of forgot. ↩
This had the potential of the being the greatest moment of the book. The freed robots coming face to face with their creator and learning it is nothing more than a petulant child, a foolish machine with a Napoleon complex. This is what I’m talking about when I say that science fiction informs the human condition; coming to grips with religion. ↩
Again, I’m showing here what I wanted in a book, but I also believe this a valid criticism. The book didn’t have to explore the theme as in depth as Battlestar Galactica, but it would have been nice to see things from the perspective of people who weren’t actively fighting the robots. ↩
Cue Jack from Lost: “Live together or die alone!” ↩
This was one of the most intriguing parts of the original V miniseries. The little girl (don’t remember her name) who was half human and half lizard was the one who bridged the gap and ended the invasion. ↩
Of course to many writers there is nothing fantastical about science fiction, they’re extrapolating from the possible or conceivable to the actual. Fantasy is fantastical, they would say. I agree, but I also know Stephen F. Hamilton’s eButler is pretty fantastical to me. ↩

On Violence and Children's Stories

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:38:31 -0400

A wonderful post by Ben Myers on the role of violence in children’s stories. The key quote:

There are people – mostly people with PhDs who have never met a real child – who say the old fairytales and adventures are too violent. For my part, I tend to avoid contemporary children’s writing because it is, for the most part, not violent enough. Only an expert could think that what children really need is stories about tolerance, multiculturalism, sensitivity to difference, and all the abominable boredom of what is called ‘life skills’.

The stories I remember most from my childhood, the ones that had the greatest impact on me, are stories full of violence, bravery, and very little adult supervision. In other words, exactly the kind of world I wanted to live in. I wanted to ride the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, or discover the Kansas prairie with Laura, or confront a dragon with Bilbo, and especially walk through a wardrobe and fight an evil witch.

On the Limits of Prescience

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:05:16 -0400

Like many American boys my age, my first job was as a paperboy. For those who don’t know what that is, there used to be these things called newspapers that gave you all of yesterday’s news, and companies would hire local boys to hand deliver them to people’s houses. You could also buy a newspaper at a store, or through a machine that operated on the honor system, but many people, especially old and fat ones, preferred to have a boy deliver them to their doorstep so they wouldn’t have to actually get out of the house.

Anyway, every day I would get a stack of newspapers delivered to my house by a van-driving middle aged guy who had a, I don’t know, rapey quality about him. (I know, you’ve always wondered “Who delivers to the delivery guy?”). I would then put the newspapers into individual bags and proceed to drive my ten speed around town so people could finally figure out whether they won the lottery or which of their friends was arrested the night before. I did this every day, including Saturday and Sunday morning, for about two years. For all of this work, I was only paid $150 a month, plus tips. No one ever tipped me.

At the same time, I also fancied myself a bit of a writer. A science fiction and fantasy writer, no less. I imagined a future where I would live in New York, rich off of all my short story sales, drinking champagne every night and hanging out at a lot of coffee shops. Obviously, this was before the bottom fell out of the lucrative short fiction market; now, I only imagine living in Poughkeepsie and drinking Coke Zero.

All of this took place between 1992 and 1993, at the height of the Fab Five and right before internet access became commonplace. I was cutting my teeth on Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Alan Moore, Robert Jordan, and Neil Gaiman while enjoying the musical stylings of Nirvana and Public Enemy. Bill Clinton was playing the sax on the Arsenio Hall show and Michael Jordan was already the greatest basketball player of all time. This was when I was at my most naive and optimistic; in only a year, Kurt Cobain would kill himself and O.J. Simpson would drive a white Bronco down the highway, thus ending my extended childhood and thrusting me into the cynicism of late adolescence.

So, as I was delivering my newspapers, I had quite a bit of time to think. About an hour and a half every day. During that time I would write stories in my head, most of them sci-fi, and most of them very, very bad. I don’t remember most of the stories, but they were probably blatant ripoffs of popular stuff with a very obvious avatar of me as the protagonist. Oh, and I also probably was a ladies’ man, closely depicting reality.

One story that I do remember was decent, but made irrelevant by modern technology. The protagonist was a young paperboy in an isolated farming town who went from house to house with a 3.5” floppy disk (the things used before CDs and thumbdrives but which were not, in fact, floppy), loading the daily news into each home’s central computer. The character would ride his hoverbike to a house, insert the disk, enter his passcode, and upload the news; after upload, the family could read the news on any computer they had, as well as the TV and a tablet like device (the latter stolen from 2001: a Space Odyssey).

The paperboy, who was never given a name, grew tired of hearing all of the bad news. Day in and day out, he would read about war, rape, murder, famine, and even cyber attacks (which seem quite obvious considering everyone had an unsecured disk drive on the front of their house). The more he, and the town, knew about the world, the more depressed they became. So, in a fit of inspiration, the paperboy decided to rewrite the news to make it more upbeat. (It’s unclear whether cable TV existed in this world.) He wrote what he thought the news should be, making nations sign peace agreements and the murder rates drop precipitously.

Sure enough, the people of the village cheered up. They came out of their funk and started being nice to each other, organizing street fairs and festivals. Block parties were a weekly occurrence. Utopia was at hand. But, of course, that could not be. People from the government found out about the paperboy and tried to shut him down. They sent a new paperboy, a paperman, who delivered the real news while attempting to subvert the false news. The paperboy fought back but was, in the end, defeated by the government. The people, who probably knew the news was fake all along, went back into their black mood.

For a story written by a 13-year-old, The Paperboy wasn’t too bad. I’m sure it wasn’t original, and it certainly was inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four and Pump up the Volume, but it was enough to earn me an A+ in Mrs. Williams’ English class. At the time that was all I really cared about. While I was hoping for a literary career, I was much too shy to actually show anyone but my teacher the piece. (NB: I’m still much too shy to show anyone my writings.)

As far as literary themes, the story isn’t too bad. It says a lot about the nature of the news and how we are being manipulated by what our newsmasters choose to tell us, as well as how knowledge does not always lead to enlightenment, sometimes it just leads to misery. This is one of the things I have always loved about Dune, and something that shows up quite a bit in my writing; a character seeks to learn a mystery, but upon learning it discovers the Pandora’s Box should never have been opened.

Another key element is the individual rebelling against the collective. This is quite a trope is sci-fi, especially dystopian fiction, but one that appeals to teenagers. I can imagine how pleased I was at writing about a character who was the only one to see the problem and who took it on himself to fix society’s problems. This is, of course, every teenager’s place in the world.

The ending, a dark bit of business that would characterize most of my stories, was more about my feelings of futility in the face of the adult world than anything. This Cassandra complex, of both seeing the future yet being unable to do anything about it, is perhaps a bit too biographical, but it does sum up how I felt at the time. (And often feel today.)

The problem with the story is not necessarily the plot or the characters, cliches and all, but with the treatment of technology. At 13, I could not imagine a world where the internet existed (although it did exist at that very moment) or where people had an abundance of choices for getting information. In the town I lived in, population 500 or so, not a single person had internet access. The library didn’t and the high school didn’t, nor would they for at least 5 more years. The only options for getting news were two out-of-town newspapers, one radio station, a few TV stations from 100 miles away, and, if you were lucky enough to have cable, CNN. Within that context, it made perfect sense that everyone could be fooled by fake news. I was constrained by what I knew, although I could have imagined greater.

Also, while the idea of someone physically uploading news to your home computer network is laughable today, at the time it made perfect sense. I remember sharing this revelation with my friends, who were certain something like that could never happen. There would always be newspapers, they assured me. Again, we were constrained by what we knew. I knew that one day digital news would replace paper news, but couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the bits would be delivered by wire instead of a person. I understand how stupid this is, since there were already technologies in place that did this very thing (computers, fax machines, telegraphs, etc), but at the time it was the only feasible solution. Also, I really didn’t want to lose my job.

The problem I had, one the affects even great writers, is that there is a limit to what I can imagine. For all of the iPads and cellphones that were predicted, there are tons of things that sci-fi writers just got plain wrong. How many stories had flying cars and ubiquitous jetpacks? How many movies and TV shows from the 90’s still had us using giant CRT monitors fifty years in the future? How many imagined the miniaturization of computers and the rise of mobile computing?

This limit to our prescience is nothing to be ashamed of. Storytellers are not in the business of predicting what will happen in the future, they are in the business of telling really good stories. You don’t read Dune to figure out how the Holtzman drive works, you read it to follow Paul on his journey. You don’t care that much of the hyper and warp drive stuff is crap, you just want the hero to rocket off into the stars. And in the case of my (terrible) story, it’s not important that the paperboy’s technology is outdated, what’s important is that he discovers the truth of knowledge.

What is Starship Merlin?

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:26:43 -0400

Short answer: it’s Mike Frizzell’s personal blog. I am a nobody you’ve never heard of.

Slightly longer answer: In trying to come up with a name for this blog I wanted to combine two of my loves: science and fantasy. More specifically, the intersection of the magical and scientific with the imagination. Nowhere are we as humans more creative than when we imagine what can exist, or what could have existed, given the proper amount of technology and magic (which are often indistinguishable). This blog, then, seeks to explore what it means to be human by examining creativity in the light of history, theology, and philosophy.

(Basically, I really want to write a lot about Dune and how frakking awesome it is.)

Long Answer: For years, I’ve written about and linked to science/tech stuff. After thousands of posts, and tens of thousands of words, I realized how unhappy it made me. I know examining how blogging makes you feel is quite a first world problem, but the core of my dissatisfaction was in how non-creative the whole endeavor is.

Linking to something some guy wrote and then adding a paragraph onto it is not creative. It is merely passing along a link with a quick thought, something I could do better on Twitter (and get much better results). Writing about how terrible Twitter’s quick bar is might have some effect on the future if you’re an important developer, but for the rest of us it’s merely a temporal distraction. In a year, no one will remember what you wrote and in ten years the whole “problem” will seem silly.

What I want to do, which is easier said than done, is to actually create, to provide original content. I want to post things that I spent time on, that I sweat over, things that require me to stretch my feeble mind. I want to create.

Of course, all of this is more than a little arrogant. First, I’m assuming I can do this, and second, I’m assuming it will be worth reading. Well, that’s for the reader to decide. Feel free to comment and any post, whether positive or negative, and let me know what you think.