Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia

Word of the day: Sunk

Long Story Short: Owen hurt the feelings of an ineffable monster in another dimension.

As a general principle the second novel is more important than the first. Anyone can write an interesting book, given enough effort and time. The amount of people who a second interesting book is much smaller. (Of course Larry is far beyond this at this point.) If The Empire Strikes Back had been a flop we would not have Star Wars as a thing these days. Vendetta succeeds at this. Many of the writing bad habits that bothered me from the first book have been ironed out. (Although, Larry still used “Stated” for about a third of dialogue tags. Just one of my pet peeves.) The gun lingo has been dialed down but is still ever present. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, every writer loves their own expertise a little more than their readers. I do remember a time or two where I felt I was missing something by not know what the gun a particular character pulled out looked like.
Pacing is less breakneck than the first book. It was nice to have time to puzzle out the mystery before revelation.
Vendetta isn’t shy about hitting the emotion button.

Last Word: Smile.

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Monster Hunter International

Word of the day: Shoot.

Long Story Short: A guy who likes to shoot gets to shoot monsters.

One of the all time great opening lines. The language is rough, this was Larry’s first published book. I recommend people start with either Hard Magic or Son of the Black Sword if you want to see what Larry Correia is all about. But really, you read Correia for the action. Some of the best action scenes I’ve read. This is really heavy in gun terminology I hear that he backs off on that in the later books as he is aiming for a wider audience. (Scatter damage is better against

I read this in the Monster Hunters Omnibus so I didn’t know when the end was coming. As things were ratcheting up near the end I kept finding myself going, “Okay, this is it he can’t get bigger than this.” and kept being wrong. I’m not sure if I can recommend this because the book is heavy, it makes it harder to smuggle into work.

There is a slight language advisory, Larry swears like a dairy farmer, but there isn’t too much in this book. (Although it was more than his other worlds.)

Last Word: Pitt.

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True Talents

True Talents by David Lubar

Long story short: The consequences of having psychic powers starts to hit the group.

This is a different animal from Hidden Talents. We get the POV of various characters and the stakes are much higher. It is less focused because of this but Lubar manages to tie all the threads together. My favorite part of this book is that the boys have ambition, well most of them. They are working toward a goal, they have a plan.

The great thing about the Talents series (of which I hope we get another book so we can figure out what this “pattern” stuff is all about) is how lowkey it is about the powers. They aren’t flying around saving the world. They are just kids trying to figure crap out.

Major Bowdler is an interesting character, he’s motivated by pride but thinks he is teaching people lessons. From all I’ve read of Lubar his major project is exploration of pride. (Even the gameboy Frogger Adventures he wrote for.)

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Trigun #1

Long story short: On a inhospitable planet colonized by humans, the force of nature known as Vash The Stampede tries to save everyone who is trying to kill him, while being pursued by two intrepid insurance adjusters.

I luckily found this and volume 2 at a thrift store. There was also a whole shelf of Narutos, but Naruto is kinda the point of no return. (Don’t worry I looked away for a second and the Narutos had disappeared, they are off running at a tilt somewhere.) I’m not sure if I would have picked it up had I not already seen the animation. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on, if the pacing were pulled back a little I think it would have worked better.

One interesting thing here is that they reveal the nature of Vash and the Plants much earlier than in the show. This is a good thing I think. My position is that if you have a cool idea it’s always better to give your readers that cool idea as soon as possible. Nothing is more annoying than a story chanting, “I’ve got a secret.”

Anyway, depending on your tolerance of manga this is a great one.

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The Amazing Spider-man 2: How to Spider

 

I’m going to be spoilery so go see Amazing SpiderMan 2. I personally forbid you from reading any further if you haven’t seen it. Not that I have any power over that. At the end of the day you have to make your own decisions. Just in case you don’t want spoilers but are one of those people who can’t control themselves and feel compelled to read past warnings I’m going to ramble a bit before I get to any real spoilers. Also I’m a rambler, do with that what you must.

It’s too much to ask that a story be the same when it is told in a different medium. It is even too much to ask that a story is the same when told in the same medium to different people. Even the same person approaching the story at different times will see it differently. It isn’t too much to ask that the spirit of the story remains across mediums. Yes, spirit is hard to codify. Impossible to universalize. Difficult to understand and reproduce. We can tell when they don’t even try though. (Cough Shamelion’s Last Airbender movie cough hack.) Adaptation is a form of scholarship, when you make a movie about something you are also making a statement about it. The whole point is to show the initiated a new side to it we haven’t seen and to advertise the rest of the story to those new to it. Also the point is to make money, don’t forget the money.

Now, SpiderMan is huge, it’s a concept and a story that has more words and pictures about it than most other things. When you go and make a SpiderMan something you are adding to an already large body of work. It is multi-faceted and has had many authors. The only reason we can say it is the same thing is it shares the title. I find it funny when people talk about cannon as if it were a real thing when it comes to things like this. There is no one real SpiderMan. Different versions hold different treasures for different people.

ASM 2 is the most SpiderMan movie ever made. The scholarship into the earliest issues of ASM shows. They hit on all the points that made SpideMan a top tier hero from the earliest days of Marvel. He’s not just strong he’s a scientist. He’s not just a nerd but he’s also good with women. (That was a part sorely lacking from the Maguire movies.) He climbs walls and builds gadgets. His fighting style is half psychological half tactical. He has to save the world and struggle to pay the bills. He’s both warrior and detective. Andrew Garfield’s interpretation is spot on for the SpiderMan who lives in my head.

Jamie Foxx gives a whole new angle to Max Dillon. It’s great that he was already fixated on SpiderMan before gaining powers. The original Max Dillon was a jerk of a lineman who wouldn’t climb a power pole to save a man’s life till they paid him to. Then after gaining powers decides to rob banks, because why not? I love that this interpretation is a terminally lonely dude who is so lonely that he doesn’t know how to interact with people anymore. I feel for him because I’m much the same way. A good villain is a tragedy.

It did disappoint me that what put him over the edge was a sniper with an itchy trigger finger. Those don’t really come in that variety. Snipers are the most disciplined shooters in the world. It’s a terribly overused trope. I’d rather have had SpiderMan make the mistake, being caught in a lie or making an ill timed aggressive move. It would have been better for the hero/villain symmetry.

A major issue the movie has which didn’t bother me in the least is the fifth act tacked on to a four act structure. The movie really ends when Electro is defeated. That’s the yay moment where we can all go home happy. For many kids the movie Bambi ends with Mom hitting the eject button at a certain happy point. The second the screen turns green is when the setup for the Sinister Six movie starts. I don’t blame them for doing it this way, it gets some major plot points out of the way so they can hit the ground running next time. I think this will be less of an issue when a person can sit down and watch them together. (Unless they screw up the Sinister Six which is going to be tricky considering Too Many Villains Disease.)

Also I don’t think this particular movie suffers from TMVD as I have read from other sources. It has two villains and a bunch of henchmen. The Rhino is just a henchman and was there in the end to show us that SpiderMan got his groove back.

Gwen Stacy didn’t have to die.

Emma Stone has the speed and delivery to keep up with Garfield which was important in their exposition scenes. I want more of her being Gwen. I want more Gwen running around being smarter than SpiderMan keeping him grounded in reality.

People who love the early SpiderMan comics have a Gwen shaped hole in their hearts. Now hopefully they pulled it off well enough in these movies that people who loves these movies will have a similar one. Not because I think it is good to have holes in your heart, but no I do think it is good to have holes in your heart. Good holes I mean, not the surgery-needing kind, metaphorical ones make you a person who cares about things and people.

Anyways, ASM 2 is my favorite movie so far this year and I foresee it being one of my favorites in the future. 2 has turned out to be a good number for Spidey. You have to understand that I’m a hardcore SpiderFan. “With great power comes great responsibility” is in my code of honor. Know that I am seeing this through the eyes of love, and love forgives.

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I Want to Transfer to Monster’s University

 

 

Yes there is something after the credits, and it’s worth waiting for.

Monsters University may just be the best University/Sports movie of all time. Hyperbole out of the way it does many things right. I heard a great deal of groans when it was announced, despite the beloved classic Monsters Inc. was, people are weary of sequels. Disney sequels especially. The presence of the sequels included with the recent Blu-ray releases of the Disney films makes some people not want them at all. Planes comes out soon, Finding Dory is on the horizon. We may even get Wall-S, Braver, The Uncredibles, or perhaps even . . . A Bug’s Death. (Cast after A Death of a Salesman, as A Bug’s Life was cast after The Seven Samurai. Poor Flick is old and never lived up to his great potential. Flick Jr. and Biff don’t know how to help him. You get that one free Disney/Pixar if you promise not to actually make it.)

But Pixar is good at sequels. The trick to a good sequel that wasn’t planned from the beginning is to not try to replicate the first movie. To try to find a different story to tell with the same characters. Toy Story 2 could have been Buzz and Woody spending all their time coping with the new dog. Vying for Andy’s attention against a new, more compelling toy. It would have been the same story again. Instead we got a story about toys that aren’t played with, owned by a man who only see them as investments. Toy Story 3 gives us something new also, Andy moving on is an ineffable reality instead of the danger they were fighting against in the first movie. It was about coping with an unavoidable change of life. Not that they have a perfect record, Cars 2 seemed more like an extended CarsToon. (As some of the Disney “sequels” were just reprints of tv episodes.) They’ve earned my trust with sequels.

And another thing, “prequels” are usually actually just sequels. They just happen to be sequels that chronologically happened before the events of the quel. Rarely are they designed to be seen first. It angers me to find many omnibus versions of The Chronicles of Narnia putting The Magician’s Nephew before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Sure it happened before, but it isn’t the introduction to Narnia that LWW is. It is written to an audience that has already had much adventures in Narnia and knows Aslan. The Star Wars prequels mean much less when you haven’t seen Darth Vader’s redemption.

The thing about MU, is it treats the characters seriously. Yep, it’s silly it’s filled with all the Monsters gags, as well as the University gags. But the movie doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to consequences. Most movies do. The thing with consequences is they are vital to storytelling and it’s something that has been lacking of late. The more common way of talking about consequences when it comes to story is resolution. The ring falls into Mt. Doom and the movie is over after a quick “where are they now” montage, even though that happens halfway through Return of the King. They should put MU on the syllabus in film schools right away.

MU can also be seen as a treatise on the conflict between Talent and Education. There is a need for both, although Education — or better stated, Hard Work — is the more important. But it is fascinating when someone without talent works and works. (I guess that’s why they make movies about it.)

Yes, the film is hung on a frame. It follows the script of a University/Sports movie quite well. It’s plot has been seen so many times before. Why does a creator do that? Can’t they come up with something unique and new? My incomplete answer is: the reason to hang your story on a frame/form like that is because you want to 1. comment on said frame. 2. tell a story without worrying about the plot. There is more to story than plot. In fact the only time you don’t use one of the standard plots is when you want people to comment on what a wonderful non-regular plot you have. Heller . . . cough, cough . . . 22. Nothing wrong with that, but if you have something to say about education, as MU does then it is far easier to say that with a stock frame.

I think Monsters University strikes a wonderful balance between their high concept arty style (Wall-E, Up) and their gag-filled fun style (Cars, Rat-patootie). All of their movies have heart though, that’s why even the weaker ones are loved and successes.

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Art

I’m an art collector. I guess that would be the easiest way to blanket explain my many hobbies. There is plenty of discussion about whether a thing is art or not. The trouble with this is it makes ART a medal you hang on the things you like. It’s fine to have such a thing. Such medals are important to help us sort through the pile of stuff vying for out interest. This creates the need for taste makers (or as @howardtayler recently put it signal boosters) or more classically, critics. But the critic’s job isn’t to tell people whether a given thing is art or not. It is their job to tell us whether it is good art. You see making the word art mean whether something is good or not moves it a slot up in the language and leaves a void where art used to be. Once we make “art” the medal that we hang on . . . pieces, things, stuff . . . we then have to struggle to find a word to fill that void. So know that when I say art I use it in the broadest sense.

Anyway, yesterday I was long overdue to go grocery shopping. I had been down to ramen noodles and costco chilli. It was also my birthday so I was in the mood for something fun. I’m very impulsive (just part of the whole ADD thing) and so largely everything I wanted I already owned. I’m also suffering from a bulk of stuff at the moment and I’m trying to reduce. Still something fun and new is what a birthday is for, so I had to look a little while. I was also a little low on cash because of the Girl Genius kickstarter. (I’ll do more on kickstarter in general another day.)

That is where this set caught my eye. I have a lot of Legos. I really should start a Lego photo comic just for fun. My large amount of legos can sometimes lessen my desire to buy more. Plus sometimes Legos can be expensive, and the cheaper sets can sometimes seem a little spare. This one was $12 and it was a fantastic deal because it is a great set. First off you get SuperMan and Zod. Usually these sets have a major character paired with a grunt, often a nameless grunt. You usually have to buy the big, major battle, 50–100 dollar set to get the major villain in a property. Second it comes with a sweet car. I think this is my favorite Lego car since the Knight Bus from Harry Potter. I think this car is going to get the honor of not being dismantled and sorted. (Which I do with most of my sets.) Zod has taste.

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I Believe in You

Word of the day: Do.

These are the words written to me inside my copy of James A. Owen’s Drawing Out the Dragons. I believe in you. The phrase is oft repeated in the book. It is even embossed on the spine. Without the dust cover one would think this was the title of the book. But I wouldn’t say that that was the central theme. He says that he believes in you (or me) because that is what he thinks a person needs in order to make choices. You need to believe in yourself. You need to believe that your decisions are the right ones, even if they end up not being so, otherwise you won’t make them at all.

When he was young James A. Owen was dying in the hospital, his grandfather was also dying in a different hospital. Neither of them were healthy enough to transport but his grandfather decided that he needed a blessing. Despite the doctor’s objections they made it happen. In the blessing his Grandfather told Owen that “The words you speak will influence everyone who hears them, if you so choose” (page 25). I can tell you that it is true, having heard his voice myself at the Life the Universe and Everything symposium. That same voice translates to the page as well.

It would be fair to call Drawing out the Dragons a memoir. But Owen’s main purpose is for it to be motivational. The point is not to read it and say, “this guy made some good decisions ” but rather to read it and say, “I need to choose to do what I want to do.” This is something I need in my life right now. It seems all I have is choices that are demanding that I make them. I need to choose to get my teeth fixed. I need to choose to write more, because that is want to do. I need finish my degree. I need to talk to people more, isolation is killing me.

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Monsters and/or Mormons

Word of the day: Zomborg

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Outside of fiction, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints get along famously with fantasy. (By that I mean that there are a lot of famous fantasy writers who happen to be mormons.) Inside fiction, though, they rarely interact. There is somewhat of a taboo in mormon culture about having a story with mormon characters and fantastical elements. To some it is tantamount to equating God with Gandalf. Even urban fantasy set modernly, like Fablehaven, only works for mormon audiences (who it had to succeed with first) because it takes place in another earth where there isn’t an LDS church. (Or at least it isn’t mentioned.) Chris Heimerdinger achieves it in his Tennis Shoes books because the “magic other world” is the world of the Book of Mormon and the Bible, and any “magic” except for the time travel conceit is firmly established gifts of the spirit. This of course doesn’t apply at all to science fiction since the whole “worlds without number” thing works its magic. I often hear tirades about Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series for mythologizing the Joseph Smith Story, by the same people who name Ender’s Game among their favorite and best books of all time. I don’t blame authors who shy away from mixing their religion with fantasy, either because of their own feelings or because they don’t think it will land with their audience. Part of writing is in exploring where you land and speaking to your audience. Nor do I imply that they are cowards when I call Monsters and Mormons brave.

Monsters and Mormons is brave. For the reasons stated above and by virtue of being an indy publication of such size. Editors Wm Morris and Theric Jepson have pulled off a fine collection here, and Jepson make an compelling argument in favor of mormon fantasy. (Although I feel compelled to add that the book could have used three more editing passes. It had a more than usual population of typos and such.) As with any anthology Monsters and Mormons is a mixed bag. The order of the day is usually diversity so you can reach as broad an audience as you can. When it comes to anthologies there is nothing wrong with digging through a little dirt to find gems. Some of the stories were exceptional and have given me much to think about and emulate. Some of them fall flat for me and will probably end up forgotten. In some places I found myself offended. “You can’t do that,” I said to the book in front of me. But that’s all right, getting offended isn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact I think it’s pretty great if dealt with properly. (I have Elder Oaks’s (I think) voice in the back of my head saying something about a rattlesnake.) When something someone says or writes violates one of the boundaries you have set up in your mind it gives you an opportunity to assess that boundary. Is it valid? Should I rethink my position on it? Should I fortify it or discard it? How do I frame my response to it so the offender understands what the issue is? It leaves you with a wonderful self examination. I hated one or two of the stories. I’m working on saving my hate for things that truly deserve it, I’m not there yet but it is my ideal. None of these are heinous enough to deserve my hate. I’ll get around to forgiving them someday. In that spirit I’ll only be mentioning my favorites.

* * *

Using the theme of bravery as a jumping point: The Living Wife by Emily Milner tackles polygamy from an interesting direction, with ghosts. This story explores the dynamics of a multiple wife situation with all the jealousies and supportivenesses and comedy. Four characters means twelve relationships and I feel that each of those got the attention they deserved.

Baptisms for the Dead by C. Douglas Birkhead was hilarious, and a nice diversion from my recent overload of zombie fiction.

Bokev Momen by D. Michael Martindale falls in the funny category as well. There is a fine bit of worldbuilding where it comes to the mode of space travel.

Let the Mountains Tremble for Adoniha has Fallen by Steven L. Peck is kind of a sticky wicket. The central question of the story is questioning authority and not liking the answer you’re given. (Meaning the authority of your church leaders, particularly the prophet.) Now we are told to seek confirmation for ourselves about general authorities, so that’s not at issue here. What if the answer you receive is no. This fits finely into the brave motif I seem to have built. All this of course takes place on a terraformed, colonized Mars that has been separated from the Earth for a long time.

That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone won the Nebula award for best novelette in 2011, so if you won’t take SFWA’s advice on it I’m not sure what more I can say about it. Stone tends to write golden age style stories full of big ideas. I find their own blurb about it to be less than satisfactory (as well as spoilery) so I’ll counter with one of my own. The new leader of an LDS branch on the sun has to try to explain the law of chastity to massive, tri-sexed, plasma beings who witnessed the beginnings of our solar system.

The Mountain of the Lord by Dan Wells really hit the spot for me and was a fantastic choice as anchor for this anthology. It is worth further study. A worthy hero story.

* * *

As for myself on the question of LDS fantasy: I’m for it, but I’m not prepared to defend it against someone who is uncomfortable with it. If I ever find a story to tell I’ll write it and market it. Why not? I understand the need to separate reality from fantasy (well, I have a more complicated view of that, but that’s another story) but I also think there is an opportunity to examine ourselves from a distance through the scope of fantasy. I was actually preparing to submit to this anthology. (I knew exactly what I was going to do but I couldn’t get around to keyboard jockeying it. That’s my largest weakness as a writer, when it comes down to actually committing the story to paper my social anxiety kicks in.)

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Roll Down the Hill for Initiative

Do you remember the games you used to play as a child? The ones where you pretended you were someone else and your friend was another someone else. During this game you would say things like, “pretend I’m a monkey and you’re trying to get me out of this tree.” I remember in kindergarten I was playing house. I was the father and I had to go out to work. In this context ‘work’ was behind the teachers desk where I would push a button all day. (All day of course lasted about thirty seconds, then I would go home and have a satisfying plastic meal with my family.)  The button that was pretending to be my job was in real life the intercom. That day I called the office at least twenty times. Each time enraged the adults involved just a little bit more. When my teacher pulled everyone together and demanded to know who kept pushing the intercom button I could honestly say I didn’t know. Sure I was pushing a button, that was my job, but it wasn’t an intercom button, it was a factory machine of some sort. I was making crayons, not calling a school office that wasn’t even in the same world as my little family. (A family made up entirely of five year olds qualifies as little.)

Now, nostalgia aside, what if I told you that I never stopped playing those games? And that there are people all over the world who grew up into mostly well adjusted adults who play pretend on a regular basis? Now before you discount me as a loon of some variety (which I am but that’s not the point) I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. RPG’s. Dice and character sheets and figurines and mountain dew and dungeons and dragons and a tyrant behind a screen who holds the fate of your character inside his hidden statistics table. (Add lasers and magic tricks and you’re playing an XDM game, but I’m getting ahead of myself.) In these games you get to live in another world for a while, a world where things are more complex and yet simpler. I guess they are just different.

Not that Role-Playing is just about escape, or even entertainment. These games test us in ways we would never be tested in real life. Like all stories they allow us to examine ourselves at an academic level. It’s safe. When we make a mistake, like poking the bear, we can learn from it, instead of being mauled. Of course our characters are mauled, then we have an interesting story to tell people about our stupid halfling navigator who thought the sleeping bear might give him directions to the dark tower.

Every player has these stories, some of horrible failures, sometimes of epic wins. I once killed a dragon with a violin. (My party helped, I guess.) All of these stories have something in common, they come from really fun games. When people aren’t having fun they don’t play at the top of their game. (The pro sports are riddled with athletes who play far below their potential because they are bored.) Games get boring when the players and/or game masters get bogged down in heavy rules, minute calculations and, worst of all, arguments. The common game has become a cold and needs a cure.

That cure has come.

The secrets of the XDM have been passed down in secret through the centuries, and like all good secrets it is best hidden in the public record. That is why Grand Master XDM Tracy Hickman (Grand Paladin-Lord Horned Dragon) decided to publish the secrets. Helping him in this endeavor is Curtis Hickman (Grand Mega-Lord Taloned Griffin) master of the black arts and Howard Tayler (Grand Chief Number One Archduke Fanged Titan) master of the . . . um . . . visual and comedic arts. (I myself was once an Archduke Lurching Kobold but I lost a bunch of levels for granting them to myself. Now I can barely even dream of being a Flaming Gargoyle. I won’t share with you what I really am, it’s too shameful.)

The XDM philosophy is all about fun, the G in RPG does stand for game. If something enhances the fun of the game, add it, if something takes the fun away, take that something away. DM’s are creative people by nature, XDM gives them license to build the perfect game. So, the question you might ask is, “Why do I need a book for that?” You don’t, unless you want the rockin’ techniques, magic tricks, and of course official XDM status with all of the rights, privileges, and honors thereunto appertaining.

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