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Tag Archives | Science Fiction

Fear of a Red Planet

By on May 23, 2011 3

First the Pirates of Venus movie becomes Carson Napier. And now the John Carter of Mars movie becomes John Carter. Why the planetophobia?

A Princess of Mars

Maybe the feeling is: everybody nowadays knows that Mars and Venus are a) uninhabited, and b) inhospitable to human life, so audiences won’t buy seeing human heroes without protective suits running about in Martian or Venusian cities having adventures with the natives. If so, I think this greatly overestimates audiences’ concern with scientific accuracy and/or underestimates their willingness to suspend disbelief. (After all, Avatar audiences bought this.)

On the contrary, I would think that the phrase “John Carter of Mars” – which (even for people who’ve never heard of the books) promises science-fiction action-adventure – is a bigger draw than “John Carter,” which for most audiences suggests nothing in particular. (And ditto, mutatis mutandis, for Carson of Venus.)

Another suggestion is that the studio shortened the title in order to be able to establish IP rights to the name “John Carter.” (They already own “John Carter of Mars.”) But it seems to me they could do that just by releasing a five-minute animated tie-in called “John Carter,” and leaving the movie with the cooler title.

Actually I’d prefer the proper title, “A Princess of Mars.” But I’d be willing to bet that some studio exec thought, “Male audiences will be scared off by a film with ‘princess’ in the title; they’ll think it’s some girly rainbow thing.”

Freeze for Scotland

By on May 22, 2011 1

“I’m appalled and outraged. What the BBC are doing is stealing Scotland’s heritage. It is a kick in the teeth to one of our most iconic industries.”

Before you click, try to guess what monstrous crime the BCC has committed.

Three Items In Search of a Unifying Theme

By on May 21, 2011 1

a) The second season of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock has begun filming, and the titles of the new episodes have now been announced. The titles arguably count as spoilers for anyone familiar with the source material, so click at your own risk.

b) I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this song since my childhood. The music is haunting; the lyrics are imbecilic:

If you don’t remember that song from The Wizard of Oz, it’s because during the 60s and 70s Disney produced several additional Oz records; the three I had as a kid (perhaps the only three made?) were based on L. Frank Baum’s The Scarecrow of Oz and The Tin Woodman of Oz, and Ruth Plumly Thompson’s The Cowardly Lion of Oz. (One of the accompanying storybooks, I forget which, seized my youthful imagination by featuring a smoking hot Ozma who bore no resemblance to the one in the books.) [12/4/13 addendum: I misremembered; it was Polychrome, not Ozma, who was thus pulchritudinously portrayed, in the Tin Woodman storybook.] In addition to the songs from the Wizard of Oz movie, the record pictured in the video contains some, though not all, of the songs from these additional records.

c) I’ve blogged previously about Moon Europa, an intriguing indy science fiction film I first saw previewed at Asheville&#146s Revoluticon back in 2006. The site and trailers I previously linked to are gone now (and inaccessible even by Wayback, thanks to Killer Robots). According to IMDB, the film was released in 2009. But elsewhere I read that what came out in 2009 was a shorter version, now called Solatrium, and the makers are still hoping to “expand the story into a feature-length film, Moon Europa.”

The old trailers are frustratingly gone, but two new trailers, one labeled Solatrium and the other Moon Europa (though they are evidently the same movie), are available:

Le Petit XXe au XXIe, Partie II

By on May 17, 2011 3

And now there’s a trailer. The anglophone pronunciation of the name “Tintin” makes me wince – I mean, he’s supposed to Belgian, right? – but otherwise it looks promising.

Makers of Worlds

By on May 17, 2011 22

Imagine a world – call it Mundavia – in which the dominant genre of literature is one in which plots, dialogue, and setting can be freely invented, but all the characters have to be real people. You can have Napoléon Bonaparte and Lady Gaga rappelling down the side of a Martian volcano while being shot at by Archimedes with a rocket launcher, and all will be well – but invent a nonexistent valet for Napoléon and you will at once be regarded as having abandoned mainstream literature for a specialised genre: call the latter genre Pseudoprosoponic Fiction, or Pseu-Fi.

Michael Whelan painting

In Mundavia, the choice to write (or to read) Pseu-Fi is regarded as just that – a choice. People ask why, e.g., Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad write Pseu-Fi, and speculate as to whether they will ever do justice to their obvious talents by switching to the mainstream. Those who write Mundavian Mainstream fiction, by contrast, are never asked why they chose that genre, because it’s not even regarded as a genre; it’s the default, by contrast with which everything else is defined as a genre.

Our world is a lot like Mundavia, with the exception that instead of licensing invented settings while forbidding invented characters, the mainstream fiction of our world licenses invented characters while forbidding invented settings. People your story with imaginary characters, and your work will still be accepted as mainstream; but place your story in an imaginary world (as I just did in inventing Mundavia), and you will be regarded as having chosen a specialised genre – either science fiction or fantasy, depending on the details.

another Michael Whelan painting

My point is that mainstream fiction is just as much a genre, just as much a choice, as science fiction or fantasy, and that there are no grounds for treating invented-characters-in-real-settings as any more of a natural “default” than invented-characters-in-invented-settings or real-characters-in-invented-settings or what have you. They’re just different ways of telling stories. And to those who say that stories with invented settings cannot be relevant to real life, I ask how that can be so, given that no one doubts that stories with invented characters can be relevant to real life. What counts as “mainstream” is conventional and culture-relative. (In ancient Greece, convention dictated that comedies be set in the contemporary present and tragedies in the legendary past. This rule may strike us as odd, but I’m sure it seemed utterly natural to Greek audiences. Of course there were plays that violated this rule – e.g. Aeschylus’s Persians, a tragedy that dealt with real events in living memory – but those were, y’know, a choice.)

(For more on the invention of worlds in fantastic literature, see of course Tolkien’s classic essay “On Fairy-Stories.”)

Le Petit XXe au XXIe

By on May 16, 2011 1

I grew up on the Tintin books, in both English and the original French. Now comes a Tintin movie written by Steven Moffat (the first draft anyway), directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, and scored by John Williams. I’ll probably want to see that.

Tintin poster
another Tintin poster

Click the pix for biggification.

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