Changing Forms

I was up at my parents' last week, doing general visitery things and being a good daughter. And as happens when I'm home, I got to talking writing with Dad. He's about the only person I feel able to talk over my frustrations with, both about my own writing and about the industry in general. (After all, if you talk about frustrations on the internet, the internet will jump on your head and maybe tell prospective agents on you.) One of the things that came out of our discussions was that my frustrations over my novel not being the novel I want it to be, no matter how hard I try, could be because the novel was in the wrong form and/or not playing to my strengths.

This appears to actually have been the case, because I've shifted the form slightly and am writing again, finally. More on that at the end. I realized something else, though—I see a lot of writing blogs talk about style and structure, about how to write what sells, and about how to fix problems with the plot, with characters, with description, with mechanics. I see blogs talking about how to get out of writer's block by starting something new, having zombies attack the main character, or about how writer's block doesn't really exist and have you seen their post about fixing plot problems? I don't see many, if any, posts about solving problems by stepping back and asking yourself if the story's being told the right way, if it has the right narrative form or point-of-view. Those sorts of problems probably happen less than the other reasons for block, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'm not going to talk about that process of stepping back. Hopefully you already know how to do that. Nor am I going to talk about point-of-view (POV) shifts, because there are plenty of other people talking about those. So that leaves me to list narrative forms, in the hopes that they'll spark a revelation in at least one blocked writer. This is probably not a complete list. Feel free to add to it.

• traditional narrative - a single narrator in any POV, telling a story; may focus on a character, a group of characters, a society, an age, a civilization…. The possibilities are, as with any of these forms, unlimited.
• reflective narrative - technically falls under "traditional narrative", but enough of a shift that I'm giving it its own bullet; the narrator speaks from a point after the book ends, shedding wisdom and insight on events in their past.
• multiple narrative - any story with two or more narrators, describing events from multiple points of view or telling interweaving/parallel stories; often gives the story a broader scope.
• nonlinear narrative - a story that jumps between different points in time.
• frame story - a story that's given a context for being told—a series of discovered letters, an interview, a person editing a manuscript, etc.; will most likely have two narrators, one with much less prominence than the other.
• epistolary novel/diary - a story told through letters, diary entries, email, etc.; can be told by one or more people.
• script - a story told through dialogue and physical actions, rather than prose.
• visual narrative - a story told through pictures (photos, film, drawings, etc.), rather than or alongside prose.
• verse novel - a story told through poetry, rather than prose.

Of course, these forms can be combined. I'd say graphic novels and comics are a blend of script and visual narrative, for instance. Reflective narratives can easily show up in any of the other forms. Scripts can be frame stories or nonlinear. You don't need to stick to just one, either, if mixing them up works better. 

I can't tell you if you're blocked because you've using the wrong narrative form or if you're blocked because of something else. Obviously. You need to step back from the thick of the story and work that out yourself. But don't think, like I did, that the first form you choose is the only form the story can take. Be flexible. Try out other forms, if they strike your interest.

For the record, I'm switching my novel from a dual narrative to a frame story that drops one of the narrators and adds in another as the "framer". It'll require a whole lot more new writing, but I think it'll be a better book for it, in the end. It's so good to have the words flowing again.

Year of the Superhero - After the Golden Age

After the Golden Age is … I'm still trying to decide as I write this, unfortunately. I think the cover copy did it a disservice, in that it seemed to promise me one book when I got another. The plot summary is neat—accountant daughter of famous superheroes must help take down supervillain—but it got me expecting a cutthroat story about assembling evidence and a lot of time in the courtroom, when the story itself is more about personal journey, family, and acceptance of one's lot in life. Which is not a bad story, at all. It just wasn't what I was expecting.

After the Golden Age is set in a fairly typical superhero world. Commerce City could stand in for just about anywhere. It has superheroes—the four members of the Olympiad, as well as a handful of teamless heroes. The Olympiad works out of a command centre at the top of a skyscraper, mounts patrols, checks the police scanner, and responds to supervillain-type threats, which annoys the police. There's also a supervillain, the Destructor, who's been a thorn in everyone's side for a generation and has crazy, mad scientist schemes that are "bound to work this time!" even if he works in an escape plan anyway. There do not appear to be superheroes elsewhere, and the reasons for powers existing in Commerce City isn't explained until near the end of the book.

But that's all background. Celia West, main character, accountant, and daughter of half the Olympiad, is more interesting. She has issues centering around how disappointed her parents were that she didn't inherit powers, and she's trying to make up for a mistake in her past. It's not going so well, and when she starts helping with Destructor's trial, it only gets worse. She also gets kidnapped enough that she reads hostage video scripts sarcastically and is pretty good at sizing up bad guys. As the story progresses, she starts taking a more active role in her life and the mystery (because there's always a mystery, we'll get back to that), and learns that heroism isn't just about powers and costumes. All the same, I can't help feeling that she could've been better realized, that we could've seen more of her personality outside of her reactions to events.

Like I said, I'd expected a cutthroat trial story, with Celia tracking down evidence in death-defying ways, and that wasn't what I got. The trial takes up maybe half the novel, at most, and we don't see very much of it, or of people putting together evidence. (They're trying to get the Destructor for tax fraud, not property destruction, murder, and the other things he's guilty of.) The story's about Celia coming to terms with herself, and the central mystery involves who's behind the current crime spree, since the Destructor's under way too much security to mastermind it himself. Or is he? As Celia's tracking down evidence against the Destructor, she starts uncovering hints that there's maybe more to the kidnappings, the Destructor, and superpowers than everyone suspects. As mysteries go, it's a fairly predictable one. I caught a lot of the clues before I think I was meant to, and anticipated a lot of, but not all, the twists. It also has an urban fantasy vibe, which isn't surprising considering that's where Vaughn got her start.

There are some moments surrounding superpowers and superheroes that I found interesting. The Olympiad and Destructor are still effective in their hero/villain roles once their identities are revealed, for instance, and welcome the publicity even. There are some sweet moments in which Spark, Celia's mother, cooks food with her bare hands and such-like. There are some not-so-sweet flashbacks where Celia's dad tries to test her for powers. There's mention of the consequences of telepathy. And, so far uniquely in my quest for superhero knowledge, the accident that caused the powers is also responsible for the protectiveness the heroes feel for the city. When they say they "have to" do their job, they mean it.

Ultimately, this isn't a particularly memorable story. Sure, I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't take anyway anything new from it. Everything superhero-wise (which is why I read the book) appears elsewhere—the nature of heroism, the growing-up narrative, the realistic examination of heroes and their powers—and I don't think After the Golden Age does those any better than the other stories. It was definitely an enjoyable read and a good story, but it kind of pales in comparison to some of the other books I've read this year. Oh well, on to the next book…

Thoughts about History

I was thinking about stories and history and life the other day, about the sorts of books I read and how I feel when I read them, and about the local history I know and share, and I realized something. For me, there are two types of history. Maybe this is normal, but it's not, but I think it's interesting enough to merit a blog post all the same.

The main type of history is, of course, world history, all the facts and stories we've gathered about the span of human existence. It's epic and complicated, fantastic and scary, repeating and fascinating. It's sometimes hard to separate facts from fictions or synthesize what actually happened from all the varying reports. Most importantly, the people who populate this kind of history don't feel like people. I can read about Sumerians, Romans, Ming Chinese, Elizabethans, 19th-Century Americans, and men in WWII trenches, and unless I'm reading firsthand accounts, nobody feels real even though I know they were. There's an aura of fiction to this kind of history, and one I'd imagine historians and historical novelists have to push past at every turn.

And then there's the history of the places I know intimately, the stories about specific events and people who shaped the parts of my province I know best. While there's still a slight sense that the events aren't real, it's still a lot more grounded. I can point to landmarks or stand on hillsides and say, "This is where such-and-such happened" or "So-and-so could've been here then". I took a walking tour of historic Vancouver a couple weeks ago and had a strong feeling of "yes, this happened" because I could see the streets, knew the buildings, and, importantly, knew that the people being talked about were the same rough-and-ready types who had first colonized the area I grew up in. When I think about this type of history, I have a sense of ownership, that this is my history and something to be proud of.

This divide between world history and local history parallels my reasons for reading histories and historical novels. Most historical fiction I read or want to read, I choose because I want to know what life was like in a certain place at a certain time. The biographies and histories I choose are picked for the same sorts of reasons. I want to expand my knowledge base and find things out. But the novels, bios, and histories I've read about British Columbia—the gold rush, the ranchers, the loggers, and so on—I read because I know the basic stories and want to see how they're realized on the page. I use those books more like a time machine than an archive, and when I'm reading them, there's a deeper sense of "this could have happened" than I get with other historical fiction. I also get the time machine effect through firsthand accounts, as I alluded earlier.

I imagine this is probably a pretty common thing. History's always more immediate when you can see where it happened, or when you can see artifacts. The sense I got of European history, and the ancient world, while I was touring Europe so many years ago was incredible. And of course, local history often has a folklore quality to it. We tend to mythologize important people and events, and tell our children about them at a young age. The biggest hero of the area I grew up was a guy named Billy Barker, who found a motherlode that spurred a gold rush that built a city and drew ranchers into the area. Without him, the town I grew up wouldn't have been founded. There were other rushes, and other miners in the area first, but he's the guy everyone's heard about. I also learned the mythology of the fur trade, the Northwest Passage, and Canada's explorers.

At what point does local history become the more global "characters-not-people" history? How long does it have to be before the cultural memories fade? How much area can be called local? (My schoolbooks mythologized the colonization and exploration of the whole country, but the only bits at felt real are the bits that happened to BC.) Is this mythologizing of history what created the world's myths? I don't know. I don't even know if there's a single answer. But it's something interesting to think about, isn't it?

Year of the Superhero - Captain America

If you've been following this series, you'll know that Marvel movies make me grin like an idiot. Captain America was no exception. It was fun and exciting and a little bit cheeky, and I barely have any quibbles at all.

(Yes, I know Captain America came out weeks ago and I watched it opening week. I just didn't feel a blog post about it till now. On the upside, this means I don't have to worry as much about spoilers as usual.*)

I went into the film knowing the basics of the character through fandom osmosis and the theatrical trailers. Captain America is a whole-hearted boy scout type named Steve Rogers, who gets enhanced through "scientific" means to become a super-soldier. He has a sidekick named Bucky, and together they fight Nazis. Then Cap, as he's affectionately known, gets frozen, then thawed out later to lead to the Avengers. The trailers also told me there'd be a British love interest and Hugo Weaving delightfully chewing the scenery. I expected Hollywood gun fights and superhero quips, and I got that—but the film was more serious than I'd expected too, and there were some twists and turns in the origin story that I hadn't anticipated.

The film starts with a modern-day scene in the arctic, the discovery of a downed plane, and a suspiciously familiar shield (if you've seen Iron Man 2 and the Captain America trailers). We skip back to 1941 and go through Cap's entire origin story until he crashes the plane. The movie ends with Steve Rogers waking up in a hospital bed and discovering that he's not in Kansas the 1940s anymore. Normally I don't have much patience with frame stories like this, because I feel the frame is generally unnecessary, but in this case I like it. That first scene sets up a mystery and a sense of anticipation that lurks in the background for the rest of the film, and the final scene establishes more or less where the Marvel movie-verse is going to go next. Take those scenes out, and you're left with a run-of-the-mill origin story with a definite conclusion that necessitates a lot of explanation when The Avengers comes out. I'd have less patience with a "yeah, so we found him and unthawed him" scene in Avengers than I generally do with frame stories.

The origin story itself is pretty standard. Steve Rogers tries and fails multiple times to enlist, is taken under the wing of a scientist and brought into a super-soldier program, and proves himself and is rewarded with enhancement. He metaphorically stumbles around a while trying to find something useful to do, then becomes a badass hero who destroys Nazi facilities with a crack team of soldiers. He finally ends up in a one-to-one fight with his nemesis, the Red Skull.

With the WWII setting, the story could've gone a couple ways I'm glad it didn't. It could've been a really gritty war movie, full of dirt and blood and bodies, and make a statement about how awful war is and how comrades become family, etc. Or it could've been a goofy action film à la Indiana Jones, with campy Nazis who never seem to come close to committing actual atrocities and are basically a tame threat.

What we got instead was a war movie that pays tribute to how hard and gritty and bleak the war was at times without really getting into it, and a bunch of Nazis that, while kind of goofy looking and ineffectual in the Hollywood way of not hitting targets, did pose a fairly big threat to our protagonists. Their retro-futuristic energy weapons were a large part of that. If they'd just been guys in weird outfits…

I really liked the retro-futuristic look of the technology. I know that a lot of what I saw in terms of transformation chambers, secret labs, planes, and energy cannons didn't actually exist back then, but it all looked like it could have. I had a bit harder time accepting that with the level of technology displayed in 1941, we haven't come further than the technology seen in Iron Man, though. I mean, there's a proto-type flying car in Captain America! Even if it failed in the film, if Howard Stark could do that then, why does his son only have cars on the market in our universe? Or should I accept that the holograms and AI in Iron Man are in some way the outcome of things Stark Sr. was dreaming up back in the day? I think I'll take that option…

I nearly bounced in my seat and squeed when the cosmic cube showed up near the beginning. I didn't because I was with people who hadn't seen Thor** and didn't want to spoil them. Or scare them. I get the impression that the cube wasn't initially linked to Thor and Asgard in the comics, that maybe it still isn't, but I think it's a stroke of genius that it is in the films. It ties the continuity together, and has implications for The Avengers. I enjoyed the demonstrations of just what the cube's power could do, and I thought everything the Nazis did with it was twice as terrible because they were perverting a holy/alien artifact. Which ties into the Nazi-occult thing, too.

Individual character time… I liked Cap. I was a little worried going in because I thought he'd be either really naive or too much like a boy scout, but my fears were unfounded. He was a solid, nice, likable guy, but he didn't come off as a caricature. He was a person, a person with his head on straight, and a person who grew up over the course of the film.

The supporting cast all delivered good performances as well. I'm a little in love with Howard Stark, who has incredible flair and does crazy things like his son does. I'm definitely in the faction who wants him to get his own film. Peggy Carter, the love interest, was good as well. I was glad to see that she got to be active and badass, but wanted to see more of that. It felt like she was sidelined by the men a lot, and yes, I know that's realistic to the era, but … *sigh* I also thought the romance aspects were a little heavy-handed at times, but believable 90% of the time.

I liked Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull too. He played up the sinister, creepy madness of the character, ending up slightly on the Indiana Jones side of the war movie equation, which is where a villain like him needed to be, I think. This is a comic book movie. The baddies are allowed to be a little unbelievable and cartoonish at times. But damn, he was creepy, and he pulled off the infodump scenes pretty well to boot. My only quibble with Weaving is that he had the worst German accent of any of the German characters. It wobbled. It occasionally went a bit Aussie. The vowels were slightly off most of the time. You'd think an actor of his caliber could do better, especially since he must've had a vocal coach.

But apart from the Peggy and Red Skull quibbles, this was a solid, enjoyable film. I think my favourite Marvel characters are still Iron Man and Spider-man, but Cap is fun and I'm looking forward to seeing him again in The Avengers next summer. I've got a good sense of his character and background now, and see some possibilities for how he'll interact with the rest of the team.

* Not that I ever avoid spoilers, really, but I worry whenever I put them in.
** Yes, I know. I plan to fix this soon.

Friday Science Linkage!

(a.k.a. Anassa is too tired to think of a better title.)

I have another post up at Science in My Fiction today, this time on mountains, volcanoes, and solar system geology. I highly recommend it, since I'm totally not biased or anything, and then coming back because I've been archiving interesting science articles again.

One group of mad scientists has recently created bullet-proof human skin, from spider goats. I'm now envisioning soldiers, stuntmen, and superheroes with this stuff grafted onto their bodies, and will applaud any burn victim who opts for this treatment.

Another group of scientists have come up with brain-mimicking computer chips. Robot uprising and singularity ahoy?

Yet another group of scientists have developed a chemical to make organs transparent. It's being described as a major medical advance, and I agree.

And on a societal front, we have research on hyenas that ties complex societies to intelligence and evidence that Homo erectus could sail, because we've found their tools on Crete. And the discovery that dolphins don't whistle, but actually have "vocal chords" thrills me to no end.

As does this video, actually. This could seriously revolutionize agriculture, if it takes off.



And on a more generically inspirational note for genre writers, here's a lecture about unintended consequences of inventions and actions. Everything we do as a society, and everything we create is going to do things we don't want it to, for good and for bad, and really great sci-fi gets that. So watch, and write! (And comment?)

 

Originality Is a Lie

Yesterday someone told me there was never anything new on TV and justified the statement by listing shows similar to or which may have influenced a show which shall remain nameless, but which is currently airing and which I'm enjoying. I both agree and don't agree with their statement, but refrained from saying anything to their face about it. I save my best arguments for the blogosphere. Aren't you lucky?

You see, there are only so many stories out there. Every show is going to fit into one of those basic plots. And TVTropes has pretty much proven that there is no truly original idea. Somebody will have used that character, that situation, that trait before you, and hundreds of people will use it after you. It is impossible to be truly unique, especially since art is never created in a vacuum. Also, if you look through TVTropes for any length of time, you realize that some of these ideas go back to the start of recorded history, and probably further back than that. They've obviously stuck around because they strike a chord with people. Why shouldn't we expect people to still use the ideas today? They've been proven to work.

Like I said, though, I do agree with the "nothing new" statement to a degree. There are an awful lot of crime dramas, and a fair number of legal dramas and medical dramas, on air right now—enough that my reaction to green-lit show announcements is occasionally "oh no, not another one". Even sci-fi/fantasy shows seem to be borrowing from those subsets (Torchwood, Eureka, Alphas, Warehouse 13, Supernatural, Haven, and the upcoming Grimm). Would it hurt the networks, or the cable channels, to give us more shows without an episodic mystery underpinning? And networks do have a habit of copying from each other, which is why we have so many crime-medical-legal dramas, and why there's about to be a show about 1960s stewardesses after the success of a show about 1960s advertising executives.

However, I don't write off shows (or films, or books) because I've seen the core plot, or tropes, or formula before. I expect them. I expect that the first film about any given superhero will be an origin story. I except that any team of crime solvers will have a comic relief character, a strict boss, a tough-but-fair type, and a hero. I expect sitcoms to be about slightly dysfunctional groups of people stuck living or working together. I write off shows for lack of originality, or rather, I watch shows that display originality. Supernatural's kind of like Buffy and kind of like X-Files and kind of like horror movies, but it's also about family and "home", and it has different takes on monsters and an interesting take on religion. Bones is kind of like CSI with more skeletons, but it's focused on the lab people, not the detectives. Basically, I want to see people take the tropes and plots we've seen again and again, and do something different.

Interestingly, I've seen this "nothing new" argument leveled at TV and movies far more often than I've seen it leveled at books, though the backlash against repetitive stories occurs with both. I know from #ufchat on Twitter (admittedly a very small sample) that people get tired of the same mysteries with the same romances and same monsters. Anything different gets praised or at least mentioned. The publishing industry and reviewers will quite often point out the "different" parts of stories, as will I at my dayjob—and negative reviews are frequently "it's just like X". This happens again and again in film and TV reviews too.

I'm not sure which of my conclusions is more accurate. Does the ratio of books to shows lower the proportion of negative to positive feedback for books vs. TV? Or are readers less vocal about their dislikes compared to watchers? Are there fewer book reviewers compared to TV reviewers? Is it a mix of all these?

I'd like to see less backlash against "unoriginal" work, period. Everyone inspires everyone else and everything gets reused. We need to accept that and appreciate the ways creators do new things with old material—because, voice of experience here, that's really hard.

A Musical Interlude

I'm not up to doing an awesome written post today, or a mediocre one even, so instead I'm embedding some awesome music videos. Listen to the first three, watch the last two, and have a great weekend!


 And for the visuals as well:

Year of the Superhero - Our Gods Wear Spandex

I'm not just reading superhero fiction and watching superhero movies this year. Admittedly, that's the bulk of my research*, but when I come across a non-fiction work that interests me, I'll pick it up. Case in point: Our Gods Wear Spandex by Christopher Knowles.

Knowles' thesis is that superheroes are now what gods were then. They're fantastically powerful, they save us in times of peril**, and they are "worshipped" by their fans. He gives a lot of information about comic book history and the parallels and influences withs gods, mysticism, and the occult that crop up within it. I buy the thesis, because yeah, I see the parallels, and I think I've run into this idea before. I don't always buy that the support evidence supports the thesis, though, and there were some moments where my Inner Feminist™and Slightly Outer Fangirl™ went rawr. So I'm kind of conflicted about whether I liked the book or not.

The book starts with chronologies of super-beings and evolved humans, detectives, and religious and occult groups (Masons, Rosicrucians, spiritualists, etc.), all of which served as prototypes in some way or other for important comic book tropes. We wouldn't have had Batman without Sherlock Holmes, and wouldn't have had the Asian Guru of All Power and Wisdom™without the Victorian New Agers. There's also biographies of important Victorians and Edwardians involved in the occult (Aleister Crowley, Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) with relevant links to comics. 

Then Knowles starts charting the history of the pulps and then comic books, pointing to the first characters who could be called 'super' and noting the prototypes for later, actual superheroes. He mentions the strange and surreal plots, mystic elements, actual appearances by gods, and more that I've already sadly forgotten, and does a pretty good job of tying it back into the chronologies I just mentioned. The rest of the book is basically Knowles leading us from the Golden Age through to 2007, when the book was published, with discussions of landmark works and creators. He mentions occult and religious influences whenever applicable: Horus links to the Falcon, Superman gets his power from the sun like Ra, Wonder Woman is an Amazon, and Batman, Wolverine, and Hellboy conform to what Knowles calls the Golem Archetype. 

Unfortunately, there are problems with the text. Most importantly from a scholarly standpoint, Knowles seems to be trying too hard to prove his thesis. A lot of the links with the occult he lists are credible and work in his favour, but others seem to be pushing the connection with the occult a little far. Knowles mentions creators with interests in myths and magic and says that they deliberately put occult themes in their work, whereas I'm more willing to believe that those themes slipped in subliminally or in a kind of "oh crap, how do we explain this?" manner. (I don't deny there was an influence, though.) And he also says things like "Superhero Name was also the nickname of So-And-So Unrelated Creator", which I see as trivia and coincidence and not supporting anything. A lot of Knowles' arguments are based on his own research and opinions, by the way. He rarely quotes another scholarly source and I don't think he ever provides counter-arguments.

The next problem I have is with the book's reading of female heroes. Knowles took a moment in the history of occultism chapter to talk about initiation rituals involving bondage. When he gets to the chapter on female superheroes, he makes a point of mentioning their revealing outfits and how erotic it is to see them get tied up all the time, and links this back to those bondage rituals. Can't a girl get tied up without connotations? I've seen readings of Wonder Woman that have her as a feminist icon until the 60s and 70s tamed her. Knowles has the opposite reading, that she wasn't a proper female role model until she left her powers and lived as a human. The same kind of reading is placed on other female heroes, notably Elektra, who he tears apart for being masculine, dominant, and assertive. Oh, and of course there are a couple mentions that most comics fans are male, with the implication that the female fans don't really count because they're an extreme minority. Feminist SMASH!

Last problem: The Slightly Outer Fangirl™. She was happy to see Knowles say things like, "fans identify with Spider-Man because he's like them—scrawny, nerdy, socially awkward, and dealing with bullies all the time"***, largely because that's why she identifies with Spider-Man. She was slightly unhappy that he seems to think that socially awkward is the only way for a comics fan to be. And then (for a relative meaning of then, because I think this happened first) he says that cosplayers are acting out of the same impulse as Ancient Greeks**** when they dressed up as gods, i.e. that cosplayers are worshipping the characters they dress as; and that cosplay comes from comics fandom. One, I think "honouring" or "sharing love" are better verbs than "worshipping". Two, I always thought cosplay started in, or at least became a Thing in, Japan because of manga—which do count comic books, in a way, but Knowles never mentions them. Three, cosplay's evolved way past superhero costumes, and I'm pretty sure it had done so long before 2007. Do we then say that people who dress as Link, the Doctor, Susan Sto-Helit, or Severus Snape worship those characters? I suspect Knowles would say, "But they're superheroes, see, look look, totally counts!"

The fact that Knowles stretches credibility with a few of his occult link-ins stretches the credibility of all the links for me. If he can't be bothered to try to appear unbiased and/or scholarly about his thesis, then I'm inclined to see that as him pushing an opinion rather than presenting an argument. And if he's going to impose his (older) (male) viewpoint on comics and fandom, I'm going to question his opinions, being, as I am, younger and female. 

All that aside, the bulk of Our Gods Wear Spandex is interesting and informative, and can be read as an overview or a launching point for further research. (It's not exhaustive and not meant to be.) Knowles has a number of intriguing ideas and makes a number of connections that I hadn't thought of. I see the history of comics more clearly now, will be reading them with a more informed eye, and don't regret reading the book. At the same time, though, I am approaching the information Knowles lays out with a skeptical eye because a scholar to my standards he is not. I advise anyone picking this book up to do the same.

* I love that I get to call it that.
** Superheroes get more popular during times of national crisis like war.
*** I paraphrase. The book is no longer on me.
**** I think it was the Greeks?

Links and Science!

You may have noticed that I didn't blog this week. That's because every time I sat down to start a post, the post I promised Science in My Fiction was more demanding than anything I had planned. It's on the science in Cowboys and Aliens, or more specifically, the lack of thought-out science. It's up now, which I hope will make up somewhat for the lack of posts, and allow me to write a post or two for next week. Go read it!

And since we're talking science today, here are some links I've collected lately:

Dolphins are the first mammals to sense electricity.

Glimpses of Roman culture, via Pompeii. If you're a Pompeii nut, you've probably heard most or all of this. If you're not, read on!

Map of all the water in the solar system.

Electronic circuits skin

And more links, this time with a comic book theme!

First Avengers concept art

Timeline of the Marvel movieverse

What comics could learn from superhero movies

How much does it cost to run a science lab?

Fiction and Zombies and Mash-ups, Oh My!

I'm starting to get annoyed by the word mash-up. It's being used too widely and at the expense of other, better descriptors. It's become a buzzword, which means that it's nearly meaningless.

I wouldn't have this problem if the connotations of mash-up were more positive. For me, mash-up means "goofy, silly, poorly thought-out, capitalizing on a trend". The first use of mash-up I ran into was in reference to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—"a Jane Austen-zombie mash-up". I liked PP+Z. It had a good hook, and pretty decent execution. But then everyone jumped on the bandwagon and within months we were inundated with titles. Some of those books, or at least the hooks that pitched them, sounded dubious. "How," I asked myself, "is Little Women improved with werewolves, or Huck Finn with zombies?" The reviews I've read seem to confirm this.*

So mash-up went from describing a blend of apparently incompatible ideas to describing a blend of apparently incompatible ideas that doesn't succeed. The core meaning's still there, of course, but when a good mash-up shows up or a book/movie/game/show is pitched as one, I think people are more likely to write it off. "It's a mash-up," they say, "so it can't be any good, really." (Possibly this is what I'm doing with Little Women and Werewolves, et al.)

And now on to what sparked this post: I've seen Cowboys and Aliens described as a mash-up, and I don't think it is. Cowboys and aliens are not incompatible ideas the way the way regency romance and the living dead are. It's fairly easy to imagine cowboys and aliens interacting, after all, whereas a large part of the hook for PP+Z was how they were going to pull it off. If Cowboys and Aliens is a mash-up, so is Midsummer Night's Dream, which is essentially a romantic comedy with fairies. If Dream were a movie today, yes, I'd go watch it because hey, fairies, but I'd go in expecting it to be kind of bad and the fairies to be not entirely necessary to the story. I'm certainly going to go into Cowboys and Aliens expecting to be entertained, but nothing more—not because it's a Hollywood summer blockbuster, but because it's been pitched as a mash-up.

So what are the other, better descriptors I mentioned? How can we describe fiction that blends ideas without resorting to the shorthand du jour? Option one is to pitch it as X meets Y—the OK Corral meets Independence Day, romantic comedy meets English folklore. Option two is to form a compound noun—alien invasion western, fantasy romcom. I'll also throw out blend, mix, and combination as possibilities. Firefly is not a cowboys-space mash-up, it's a show about the Old West in space, or a space western. Calling it a mash-up would do it a disservice, and the same goes for a lot of the other work that's getting labelled as such. I think more people would pick up those books or watch those movies if mash-up never featured in the blurbs.

My suggestion, then: If we're going to use mash-up to describe anything, let's use it for the creative works with apparently incompatible ideas—Julius Caesar and unicorns, to throw an idea out there, or Adam and Eve and pirates. Anything we can imagine scenarios for, and anything that can be described without using mash-up should be. The word is perfectly functional, but the more functions we give it, the more it's used when it doesn't have to be, the less it's going to mean, and what use is a descriptive word without meaning?

Interested in mash-ups? The Qwillery has a thorough list of them.

* True story: I work at a bookstore and we can't move Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for anything.