Stan's Legacy

Jupiter's Legacy: another comic book about superheroes about comic books about superheroes about comic books about superheroes. From Watchmen to the early 2000s, when Warren Ellis and co. were hammering superheroes into a semblance of something worth reading again, to the present day, we've suffered through reinvention after reinterpretation of superheroes, finding exciting new ways to drag them into the muck, mire, and Twitter accounts of the real world, and it looks like Jupiter's Legacy (written by Mark Millar, beautifully illustrated by Frank Quitely) is another duck in the duck-row of "realistic" superheroes.

There's a reason no one reads this stuff.

I find myself thinking back through all the super comics I've read and trying to think of some good, critically acclaimed ones that weren't just gritty reinventions. The "Dark Phoenix" run on X-Men might qualify. Morrison has gone there once or twice. But superheroes writers keep returning to Stan's "realism" trough again and again. Stan Lee (or Kirby, or Ditko, or Francis Bacon, or whoever really wrote  the Marvel comics of the early 1960s) got this ball rolling before JFK's head went back and to the left. It's hard to imagine the lurid four-color trash of the early Marvel universe as edgy, but for its day it was grim, Punisher-esque realism compared to the dead-eyed authoritarianism of DC. Early Marvel was full of for-its-time realism: ditching secret identities, operating in real cities, even attempts at "real problems." Very early X-Men rings hollow because it takes a few dozen issues to flesh out the "superheroes as oppressed minority" core conceit.

And like lesser fantasy authors imitating Tolkien's form without adapting any of his underlying message, superhero comic writers continue to reach for the simplistic solution of "more realism!" without understanding why they ought to do that. Stan (or whoever) was reaching out to a generation of young people just starting to react to the alienation of the late 50s and early 60s; the kids reading Fantastic Four #1 in grammar school would go on to become the flower children in college. The realism of those early Marvel comics didn't exist for its own sake, or because of some underlying anxiety about the laughable immaturity of superhero comics; early Marvel aimed at realism because no one was speaking to the youth of 1961. Early Marvel belongs alongside the Beatles and mod fashion: it tapped into a huge need (with the potential for huge profits), and all it had to do was acknowledge a demographic.

This means that, ultimately, the appeal of realism in those early Marvel comics was based on demographic and economic concerns: Stan was tapping a market, just like the cynical marketeers a few years earlier who saw in Elvis Presley a potential youth icon whose white skin would make him palatable across America. Of course Stan was cynical, but I would take Stan Lee's honest appraisal of the value of an untapped market over WHATEVER is motivating superhero comic writers to fling themselves at "realism" over and over again like those gene-damaged mice that only know how to run in clockwise circles.

My own comic is the absolutely self-indulgent work of an amateur. I write and draw exactly what I want without a thought for my audience. A major release from a corporation looking to make money SHOULD NOT possess that same level of self-indulgence. Consider this a plea for something I never thought would be necessary: more money-grubbing, focus-group-driven profiteering.

Superhero comics make as little money as it is possible to make. They are the Absolute Zero of profitability, earning money only through the quantum fluctuations of obligation: obligation from obsessive collectors, from reviewers, from people who love a character and don't care what plots he's driven through, and from people who, if questioned, would be as unable to explain their motivations as the average Batman TV villain. A combination of merchandising and alternative media (movies, video games) can keep a few hundred career writers and artists afloat, but that's it, and until writers can stop chasing the same ideas that appeared in 1961 and were--let's be honest--concluded to the satisfaction of any reasonable person in 1985, comics will continue their decline into irrelevance.

Odd Dreams

I'm back for more. A couple years ago I basically concluded my participation in tabletop gaming because I just couldn't get a decent group together, but right now I'm writing a novel and I need a release valve for my non-novel ideas.

 Today's topic: weird dreams I had. I'm writing them down so they'll stick--and stay useful as idea-fodder, not because I expect you poor people to care.

 The first was (or resembled) a Truman Capote novel, a sort of late-period 20th century meditation on declining male sexuality seen through the lens of either anthropological fiction or magical realism--I'm not sure which. In it, Capote (or "the narrator", since it was a Capote novel only by implication) finds himself in Tibet, or a place like Tibet. At first believing he is the only white man, he instead finds himself in the shadow of a fellow-researcher of whom the narrator has always been jealous, who attracts more attention and respect from the people there, especially from the young women. The narrator finds himself in a Watson-like role, recording the exploits of his friend while growing increasingly frustrated with both his friend and himself. Despite its meager plot, the novel spoke powerfully to the frustrations of people who, thinking they had escaped themselves, experienced something that once again made them who they always were. The novel ends abruptly with the two in burial shrouds, though it is implied that the narrator faked his own death--the friend did not.

 The second is a trashy genre or perhaps book-list called "Havaoc," a 70s spy/martial arts thriller in the tradition of Clive Cussler, full of books with alluring covers that feature too many men in turtleneck-suits. The stories are full of beautiful women, barely coherent plots, and secret temples, with an emphasis on popular interpretations of martial arts techniques and a lot of technical information that is as detailed as it is nonsensical.

 These two dreams amuse me not because they're particularly interesting, but because I can see my usual writing process in them, working even while I'm unconscious. Both are no more than combinations of things I've seen, tossed together as a bunch of interesting images, themes, and moods, with little in the way of a coherent plot-structure. I'm no good at plots. (Tabletop gaming will do that to you--plots aren't my job, after all.) The "Capote" novel is a combination of a handful of things I recently experienced, from In Cold Blood to Steven King discussing the origin of Carrie's themes to a David Foster Wallace article on the decaying trajectory of 20th century "literary" fiction to the new Great Gatsby movie (that "Watson-like" role is probably more "Carraway-like") to an article I read on sky burial to the hardcover copy of the book Alive, which I grew up staring at as a little kid and which, returning to my mother's house the other day, I saw in the same spot it always has occupied. By contrast, I think the "Havaoc" books (boy were they bad!) is my brain screaming at me to write a novel that normal people would want to read, prompted by Richard Kadrey tweeting that he found his books at an airport kiosk--a great triumph for the legitimacy of an old cyberpunk!

Character Death

So yeah, I've neglected my blog. I blame Twitter. Rarely do I have something that's worth reading for more than 140 characters that isn't a comic. But that's changing. I've had a number of essays brewing lately, and right now I have one fresh in my mind.

I'm a gamer, and I always hated that nut-swinging Gamemastering style where I lord it over the players and kill them off because they weren't "smart enough" or whatever. And I'm trying to square my inclusive, tolerant, open approach to GMing with the fact that two of my characters just died like dogs in my Genius game.

Some background: Genius is a game I made for the new World of Darkness. You play mad scientists. This time, only two players showed up due to scheduling problems. They wanted to explore a warehouse full of bad guys. And basically, they screwed up, often. They made their presence known to people who were willing to kill them, they got cornered, one character got captured, the other character surrendered without a rescue plan or a call to the "cavalry," then, following an escape that, while it involved no technical fudging on my part, involved a great deal of generous NPC behavior, coincidence, and clue-dropping, the characters escaped. Wounded, they saw the crashed airship of their comrade, ran toward it, got fired upon by hidden machineguns that (miraculously) missed, kept running toward it, and got gunned down.

But that's not even a "neutral" retelling and I'm not going to pretend it is. Who knows what the players were thinking at the time? Perhaps that unwise surrender was a player role-playing a badly-shaken character (he had just killed a guy, after all). Motivations are tricky things. And I don't just want to say that the players made "bad" decisions because 1) I've dealt with stupid players--I mean, really, pig-ignorant, clueless, lazy morons, and these two aren't like that, and 2) I'm so enmeshed in the behind-the-scenes elements of the game that I can't tell if their decisions made sense to them at the time with what they knew.

Nonetheless, they died, and here, I think, is why those characters died: I ran out of explanations why they didn't die. Let me explain: ever have a player who won't latch on to any plot hooks, who just ignores and glides past them, again and again? Is it cluelessness? Peevishness? Miscommunication? Sometimes it's hard to tell. (It's probably miscommunication; it is when I screw up this way, on either side of the table.) And at the end, sometimes as the GM you're just like, "Look, you missed every single one of my attempts to get you onto the adventure, we're at an impasse." And you're probably pissed, even if the player isn't doing it deliberately or maliciously. I sort of ended up in the same situation with regard to not killing my characters. I would have been mad, but there was plenty of disappointment to go around when those last dice fell that I felt no reason to add to it.

Rather than leading a character toward a plot hook, this time I was leading them away from death. And I ran out of good "don't die" hooks. The PCs got themselves into really deep shit, again and again, and the quagmire just kept getting worse. So I found myself casting around for ways to get the PCs out, because I hate even the implication of sadistic "killer GMing."

Because I want the players to have fun; I want their characters to look cool. What does your lightning sword look like? Does it look awesome? You bet it does. You need help describing how awesome your lightning gun looks? No problem, that's what I'm here for. And I try to keep the characters alive and the players making choices and the game going; in fact, I pride myself on taking all sorts of messy situations and turning them into dramatic gold. Miss the adventure hook? No problem, I've got a cool scene that will bring you back to the main plot. Get captured? No problem--the other characters can save you, or you can sneak out, or something. Even player "mistakes" are, in my mind, just an excuse for more cool scenes.

But I have my limits. Like willworkers in old Mage who can "feel" when reality is going rubbery and paradoxical, I can feel when the world's illusion is breaking down due to too many coincidences, too many lucky breaks. If the players dodge five "Go to the Fortress of Eversummer!" plot hooks, the sixth big neon sign starts to look a bit absurd, and I just have to let it go. If the players dodge five "Survive despite going up against very dangerous people when outnumbered and without proper planning" signs...I just have to let them go. I can't stand to see the world unravel.

I don't know if my players would agree with me. They might be all "Fuck the illusion, I want my mad scientist back!" But I'm here to have fun too, and I just can't have fun when the game world's integrity falls apart. I'll move encounters around, adjust difficulties, fiddle with bad guy numbers behind the scenes, but I have a limit. Every GM has a different "world integrity" limit, from an absolutely fixed reality to a total shell-game, and I know where I draw the line.

So they died because it was either character death or, basically, dropping the facade, and I wouldn't have fun if I exposed the bare stage on which the game is played. It wasn't out of malice, either. That seems like a desperate attempt at defending myself, but it's not. I've killed characters out of malice, in my younger and more dickheaded days, killed them in a fit of "fuck you for being so stupid." I remember a thief-based D&D3 game that fell apart because one player pissed me off too much with his stupid bullshit, so off with his head when he wouldn't run away. Fair rolls, of course, but malicious ones. And I made it clear that it was his stupidity that got him killed. None of that this time; I apologized profusely, like I had just run over the players' cat or something. Because I did feel bad. It's no fun losing characters. It's no fun losing all that hard work, and it's no fun feeling foolish, or that you "lost the game." I felt bad for 'em; not even pity, just empathy. It sucked.

But it was done. My girlfriend, an avid gamer, when I described the final machinegunning, asked "Couldn't you have asked them, 'Are you sure that's what you want to do?'" Ah, the old GM "Don't Do That" hint. And I could have. In retrospect, maybe I should have. But here's my rationale, perhaps a bit post hoc: it felt railroady. That might seem strange, but there's a railroading of GM intent in addition to the regular kind. I could, if I chose, give the players all the clues they need to succeed, and no information that does not contribute to their success. But that sort of clue-train strips away a player's liberty to play his character as surely as a badly-railroaded plot. It removes a player's ability to interact with the world on his own terms, at his own pace, and in his own way. And I had already moved too far in the direction of "clue-dispenser" during the course of that session, and I felt I was stripping agency from my players. Could I have warned them? Yeah. Did I feel it was right? No; I felt I had already chipped away at their freedom of interaction and begun to expose the game's facade. Was it the right call? I don't know.

So there's my little tale. I've probably learned more about how I run games from this one session of Genius than the last 20 or 30 assorted adventures I've run. Pity a bunch of characters had to die for me to learn something, but I hope it means that future sessions will be even better.

What Matters

I've been thinking about what matters to futurists. Now it's information, a fact so obvious that it's almost baffling to look at Heinlein and Clarke and see their tremendous excitement over, of all things, transport. Because that's what a lot of 20th century science fiction was about: moving faster, moving better. And that was the trajectory of the 20th century: from the train to the car to the airplane to the jet to the space-rocket. And we just kept getting faster, and our enthusiasm for speed stayed strong, until some time well after the Apollo missions.

What's interesting is that though now so many science fiction writers are focused on information, transport wasn't the first thing to fascinate science fiction. Go back to the dawn of SF and you see an even earlier fascination with production, a concern even more distant from our own time. The early 20th century Socialist SF writers were always going on about production and efficiency and labor and all that other stuff that's as boring to us now as--no doubt--our present-day SF ramblings about gigahertz and petaflops will be to readers from the next century. If there had been more SF in the 18th and early 19th centuries, no doubt they would have massively obsessed over these new speculative political developments as much as we massively obsess over spimes and cloud computing.

This opens up a number of questions for any SF writer. The obvious one is, of course, what's going to engross the next century's SF writers? Politics, production, transport, information...then...what? Some new personal-scale sociological development? The creation and proliferation of new biological or digital organisms? We probably don't even have a word for it yet. But also--and here's one of greater interest to me--with the rise of various retro-future SF tales, from steampunk to neo-post-atomic-holocaust, it behooves us to analyze what drove the speculative fevers of previous eras, to see how we can use those concerns in our own fiction, rather than overwriting what interested a previous era and replacing it with our own fascinations. Steampunk's revolutionary original conceit--industrial-age people interested in information-age concerns--has grown a bit worn since The Difference Engine. I think a re-evaluation of our retro-speculation is in order, which would allow us to mix and match eras and obsessions. I love steampunk, but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing 19th century + information. I want to see new combinations of times and interests, new ways to bring later interests to earlier times, and speculation about how later eras, even our own, could return to the obsessions of previous centuries.

Thoughts On the 40-Year Gap

A brief aside, before I return to what I've learned from other people telling bad stories. There's an old idea that SF writing lags about 40 years behind literature in terms of form and structure. The relevant quote is from Gary Westfahl:

"Thus, we find that science fiction readers of the 1960s were shocked and sometimes appalled when writers dared to try writing like James Joyce and John Dos Passos in the 1920s, and one reason that Neuromancer so stunned those readers in the 1980s was that William Gibson boldly and innovatively imported into science fiction the attitudes and style of the Raymond Chandler detective stories of the 1940s."

And I was just re-reading that and thinking, hey, I know, I can totally jump the curve by seeing what sort of SF will be coming out in about five years! It would be like the literature from the early 70s! Then I remembered, wait, what's my favorite bit of nominally "proper" literature? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Published in 1972. So...I just spent a few minutes looking back and forth, back and forth, between Thompson's writing and my own, and the phrase "pale imitation" keeps bouncing around in my head. I'm a science fiction author lifting from literary styles that are almost exactly 40 years old.

Curses! Foiled again. Or I'm a genius. I'm not sure. No, I think it's just kind of sad and funny.

Sci-Fi Jack

Since my computer has gone kaput I've been drawing on my mother's computer. (Thanks, Mom!) This, coupled with my completing of several series on Netflix and thus needing new TV to fill the howling void in my soul that science fiction alone can fill, means that I've watched a lot of bad television over the past few weeks.

This is good. Good television--Mad Men, The Wire--mostly just makes me feel bad about my own meager talents. But bad TV, especially bad sci-fi, fills me with a combination of puerile jealousy (not so helpful) and analytical curiosity (very helpful). Examining some of these bad shows, and how they fail as art and entertainment, helps me with my own work.

Eureka was a hilarious bust, one of those shows that I had high hopes for until, let's say, 30 seconds into the pilot. However, it's also an essay in long-form about how to produce mediocre television. The funny thing is it took me weeks of analysis and the help of Kirsten to realize that I was viewing "family entertainment," and that's why it was so tepid, dull, condescending, and unimaginative. That was a depressing realization: how out-of-touch I am with market reality, even as I pride myself on my awareness of genre tropes. In that light, it feels almost unfair to analyze the show as even the sorriest attempt at speculative fiction: I'd might as well rake Wiggles over the coals for not generating an adequate secondary world in the sense Tolkien uses the term.

Still, it was an engrossingly stupid show, and helped me clarify one of the elements I've seen in a lot of televised science fiction. I've taken to calling this element Sci-Fi Jack.

Sci-Fi Jack--who is, weirdly enough, often named Jack, or John--is the viewpoint-character for most middling science fiction shows. Think Stargate, Eureka, Farscape, The Invisible Man (the 2000 series), even, to some degree, G vs. E (an otherwise very good show). Sci-Fi Jack is stupid, crass, "common," and simple--even if he technically has an advanced degree or should otherwise have no business being the "salt of the Earth" type. However, he's not an old codger. Sci-Fi Jack is dim, yet virile, a man's man, a creature of action rather than thought. His only nod to intelligence is a sort of low, smarmy wit, which is used to sneer at the other characters, who may be intellectuals, bureaucrats, or ball-busting women (the ball-busting woman is almost always paired with a Sci-Fi Jack, because bickering looks like cleverness, I suppose). Sci-Fi Jack drifts through the show as the audience surrogate for anyone ashamed, at some level, of all the goings-on in these silly sci-fi shows, what with the robots and the independently-rotating gyroscopes. He sneers, he smirks, and in the end, he wins due to his vigor, street smarts, and know-how.

Now, the Sci-Fi Jack phenomenon is fascinating for a couple of reasons from my position as a writer of speculative fiction, since it seems so easy to fall into the trap--especially for me, with my fondness for Whedon. A bit of flipness (a disease that afflicts me), a bit of anti-intellectualism (which emphatically does not--at least in general--but I still worry), and I'm duplicating the sneering, glib condescension of Sci-Fi Jack. It's a bit unnerving how easy it is, and I spend a lot of time staring at my comic making sure that I don't slink into that little hole. The worst part is how close Sci-Fi Jack is to a lot of excellent SF characters. The winking arrogance of Robert Downey, Jr's Tony Stark is a hair's-breadth from Sci-Fi Jack, yet Stark is one of the best-realized movie protagonists of the past few years.

The difference between the two is narrow, but it's there, in two areas. First, there's the willingness of the character to engage in the assumptions of the setting. Stark engages the genre. Sci-Fi Jack rejects, condemns, and sneers at the genre. Second, there's the simple matter of good humor. One of the most arresting parts of Eureka, to me, was how thoroughly unlikeable all the main characters were. (By contrast, I think of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show with dreadful plots and pacing that was saved, more often than not, by the likability of the cast.) Eureka's main characters are a smirking know-nothing, a ball-busting woman, and a snotty little kid. Tony pulls us in: his "No gang signs, please" when the soldier riding with him throws up a peace sign forces us to like the guy, with his combination of self-deprecation and absurd humor. He's a likable character--not a likable person, in the same way that Dr. House isn't a likable person--but as a character, he makes you like him.

And it's good to realize that, and to appreciate the idea that funny characters--especially funny protagonists, and especially "darkly" funny protagonists--are dangerous. Do well and you have a great, likable, funny character, someone who can carry a whole series. Screw it up by making the character reject or sneer at the genre assumptions, or just by making him an annoying git who's more of a bully than a comedian, and you're on your way to Sci-Fi Jack or some other form of botched protagonist.

Next week: what I've learned from the mistakes in Carnivale and Dark Angel.

You Ruined Everything for Me, Lt. Worf

I blame all of my shortcomings as a writer on Lieutenant Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Okay, maybe not all of them. But a significant shortcoming, which is this: I find it hard to give characters a “voice” that differs greatly from my own, and I find it hard to create characters who make predictable, inappropriate choices, even though many people in real life behave that way.

And it's Mr. Worf's fault. You remember Worf, right? The Klingon whose answer to everything was “attack it immediately,” whose motivation was some loosely-defined code of honor that made you wonder if Klingons weren't susceptible to that brain parasite that makes mice unafraid of cats so the parasite can reproduce in a feline digestive tract.

Because it was always the same damn thing, wasn't it? Picard would ask for suggestions and everyone—everyone, even Troi, another dreadful character—would be allowed by the writers to put forth interesting suggestions and solutions, but no, not Mr. Worf, for our Klingon friend it was always “Let's attack immediately.” I watched all seven years of TNG when I was a little kid and this never changed. Not once, not ever. For every situation, you could predict exactly what Worf was going to say. He was like Leonard Nimoy's poetry. And he'd never surprise you, not even within his milieu; he'd never say “The best military tactic—since I am the military-minded guy, I guess, because that's how the writers have weak-ass stereotyped me—is to stall for time in pointless negotiations until backup arrives and we can kill them easily.” No, it was always “Suggestions,” and Mr. Worf would be like “Let me float outside the hull and punch the enemy ship, Captain! Klingon fists are mighty!”

And it screwed me up, because I'm always looking to avoid a Mr. Worf; I always pore over my writing and make sure there's not some guy whose answer is always the same thing—or if it is the same thing, that it's not always stupid and inappropriate. It was like Worf was that chevalier kid from the D&D cartoon, written in to teach the viewer a valuable lesson about not being an artificially constructed dipshit with no character depth. And now I keep reacting against Worf, and I'm worried that I'm stripping the archetypal weight away from my characters. And avoiding stereotypes is good, but turning every character into a fully rational actor is terrible even in hard science fiction, and I don't write anything close to hard science fiction. So now I'm going the other way with my work, going back through it and making sure that all my characters have unique voices and approach situations from their unique point of view, because I spent so many years making sure I didn't produce another Mr. Worf that I inadvertently went too far in the opposite direction.

So my writing is worse because of you, Mr. Worf. Thanks.