Here's Johnny (Again)

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/01/what_stanley_kubrick_got_wrong_about_the_shining/

The novel "Doctor Sleep" has been published: it's Stephen King's sequel to "The Shining". That’s the reason that Salon has asked him again about Stanely Kubrick’s film adaptation of the book, an adaptation which King still dislikes, mostly because he disagrees with its interpretation of the characters.

There's nothing here that King hasn't said before. Going over old ground is irritating for us nerds who know that, but I don’t blame anyone involved with this. The public at large probably doesn’t remember what King said about Kubrick’s adaptation, and reminding them helps stir up interest in “Doctor Sleep”. A little mercenary, but hey, who’s counting?

The real irritations are both the claim that Stanley Kubrick “got wrong” anything, and the claim that his film’s quality and popularity means that King has relinquished his right to complain about it.

Firstly, a director, whether they are as strong as Kubrick or not, can’t “get wrong” something in an adaptation simply by changing it. Even if they alter the core of the story (which King argues that Kubrick has, especially in casting Jack Nicholson as someone who already looks about to go crazy, instead of a broken man who is the unexpected victim of the hotel), they are not “wrong”, but only putting their own spin on things, because they are a separate person from the original writer and must retell the story as they see fit.

That is not to say one can’t dislike adaptations, just that “wrongness” really doesn’t factor into such dislike. It’s all about a personal reaction, not the absolute that “wrongness” suggests. But this also means making room for those who continue to dislike an adaptation, even when the culture at large loves it.

Just because Kubrick’s version of “The Shining” is an excellent film, might be better-remembered than the book, and the TV miniseries can’t surpass it for quality, doesn’t mean that Stephen King can’t say it misrepresents his work. There is no adaptation so good, or so well-known over the original, that it can make an original author’s negative reaction “wrong”.

Even if it’s instinct to pit adaptations against the original work, one version can’t actually “win” over the other. The only complaint might be that King is still airing his grievances after so many years, but he was asked to do it, and so the act can only be met with a shrug, not replying that Kubrick’s version has “won” over his novel and so he should be quiet.

On the Purported Emasculation of Stock Movie Monsters

You've heard it: these days, werewolves and vampires are too wimpy. They've been turned into love objects for teenage girls, made friendly to young children, have been figuratively and even literally defanged.

My gut reaction is to prefer monstrosity in my stock monsters, to prize those examples that are violent, bloody and accursed. Until recently, I've never tried to understand why I do this, but now I think I understand: it's because these types of vampires and werewolves are generally better for telling intense, conflicted stories.

I'm still not interested in pushing my preferences on the media culture at large, in pretending to dictate what monsters should be. If we're going to keep using the same monsters over again, we had better keep them open to all possibilities, to reduce the repetitiveness.

The problem is not that monsters have become lovers. I hate Twilight as much as the next nerd, and I don't like the idea of vampires and werewolves as something to fall in love with rather than maul you. But this phenomenon is just one part of the larger thing, the real reason I'm uncomfortable with the "modern" portrayals of vampires and werewolves: that authors transform being a monster into being a gift rather than a curse, and in the process, remove a source of conflict. Being a "monster" now becomes wish fulfillment, and leaves writers scrambling to come up with new sources of conflict.

New writers are often told that the goal of a popular fiction story is to "hurt the hero". It means that you must put the protagonist under fire because how they respond will show who they really are, and it will drive the story. If there is no conflict, there is no plot, and we never get to see what the hero is made of (even if it turns out to be mush).

This is reflected in the many stories that have wishes and dreams that never turn out to be what they appear to be. There are caveats, deception, and eventually the hero will be forced to sink or swim. If a character gets everything they want right away, then there is no plot.

In the standard formula, the vampire or the werewolf is the source of the conflict. They are the obstacle for the heroes to defeat, or the curse that affects the protagonist. In this, it is made clear that being a vampire or a werewolf is not desirable.

Writers obviously have found new sources of conflict to drive stories where being a vampire or a werewolf isn't destructive, but there's still that bedrock need to have werewolves and vampires who are frightening. The desire for conflict isn't the only reason for this, but it's the most relevant. That's why I don't like it when the vampire is no longer a monster to be defeated, and the werewolf is no longer a ticking time bomb. There's no longer any tension, anything to draw an audience in.

Vampires and werewolves becoming lovers is only the offshoot of this. Once you have it so that vampires and werewolves are more like superheroes, or they are just "good people", you have the potential to make them into unalloyed love-objects.

 If you are going to have a vampire or werewolf love interest, that means dialing back the cursed aspects at least a little (how much varies widely), and that would involve taking them in a direction that was more to do with superpowers. It's not that far from Selene to Edward, really.

This is especially true of vampires. You can argue the tradition goes back to Dracula and so is beyond reproach, but even so, the idea that being a vampire means you get to be beautiful, aristocratic, and immortal, with tiny, pretty fangs seems much more like wish fulfillment than even the most easiest and voluntary of werewolf transformations. You can try to layer angst on top of the facts, but even so, it sounds hollow because of the opulence involved.

Yes, it's true that everybody seems to have a much smaller problem with superhero werewolves and vampires than they do with "romanticized" ones, but I think they're two closely related things.

I doubt everybody is thinking the issue through to this degree, both on the side of fans or creators. Some are simply acting out of a conservative instinct: if monsters have always been this way, then there is no reason to change them, no matter what the quality of the results.  That might also be true for me, too, a little.

Many blame women for this phenomenon, considering it the result of girl cooties getting into the horror genre, whether it's Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer. Usually this is an unspoken accusation, but sometimes it's out there in the open, such as an article about an upcoming TV series based on Guillermo del Toro's The Strain. It characterizes its horrific, parasitic vampires this way: "Fittingly for male-driven FX, unlike the traditional, romanticized portrayals of vampires as tuxedo-clad studs, The Strain‘s bloodsuckers have no seductive powers […]" The implication is that women don't know what "real" monsters are, and have polluted the genre with their idealized blood-sippers.

That's wilful ignorance at its finest, what with sexualized female vampires being so popular. This is a direct example of the sexism brewing whenever  nerds complain about monsters "no longer being scary", but it's not the only time these sentiments are obvious.

I refer to "emasculation" intentionally, because even if they don't blame women for it, the nerd rage is directed almost entirely at male monsters, often calling them "pussies" or "fags". They're no longer scary because they're like icky women, is the message. I haven't seen anyone complaining that modern female monsters aren't scary enough.

Twilight deserves all the garbage thrown at it, but to act like the worst examples of monster emasculation are the result of some female thing, of tainting monsters with femininity in one way or another, or that seductive female monsters are totally okay, just kills the argument that monsters are no longer scary. If  you blame women for it, you lose.

Besides becoming gifted beings and romantic objects, another way that monsters are supposedly emasculated by modern culture is to make them out-and-out good guys, or even persecuted by humans, the "real" villains. Children's cartoons like Hotel Transylvania or the Monster High franchise are the most recent examples, but of course there are many. Because this stuff is for kids, and far older than Twilight, it seems to have passed off the nerd radar, but I'd like to talk about it briefly.

This stuff bothers me is because it just flips the absolute morality around, so that we're still dealing with simple lines between good and evil, but then the writers can pretend they're being creative. Straight reversals can be effective, but a lot of the time it just leaves a story feeling cheap and simple. And that's a lot worse than monsters no longer being scary.

In short, while I do dislike the idea of vampires and werewolves not being obstacles or threats, it's a phenomenon that's larger than paranormal romance. It's about supernatural powers becoming superpowers, about wish fulfillment over conflicts. Not to say it can't be done well, but it can be hard to create new sources of conflict and rebuild a mythology. And whatever the results, just don't blame women for it.

Guilty Pleasures: Certain Dragonlance Novels

Dragonlance is a universe of novels based on some role-playing game. The universe is huge, and goes on to this day. As anybody might expect, the central storylines are bland Tolkien knockoffs: motley people in search of MacGuffins to defeat their assorted Dark Lords. The most popular and longest series tell different versions of such a story.

However, when I was a kid, I loved the hell out of some of Dragonlance's dragon-centric side stories. There were both short stories and novels with dragons as viewpoint characters, and that was total catnip to me. It's true that non-tie-in fiction has a lot of sapient dragons, but the stories tended to be ones with dragons, not ones about dragons, which was an important distinction for me. Dragonlance had a surprising number of stories told from a dragon's point of view, more than I could find anyplace else, so I was hooked good.

I eventually got around to reading the "founding" Dragonlance novels, and found them boring, but it wasn't because I knew how bad they were, just that they had less dragon-ness. It wasn't until later that I really began to wise up to issues like quality, and lose interest in the franchise for those reasons. I blame this on being young and also not growing up in a very literary household, but soon I got a little more experience and realized how badly-written and how badly-executed these books were.

I mentally threw out most of them, and didn't want to look for any new ones, but there were some that I couldn't let go of. One of them was The Black Wing, which I've spent more time talking about than the writer probably did thinking about. It's about a dragon named Khisanth, a young villain-in-training with a crappy life that's mostly the result of her own bad choices. Khisanth is still my favourite dragon character of all time, far above the more iconic dragons of mythology or modern fiction. However, the novel is a disjointed mess, and doesn't develop its ideas well enough. The book isn't anything I would have admitted to liking if I wanted to be taken seriously, but it's sort of a personal icon nonetheless.

I also have a weakness for the Kang's Regiment stories, too. In order to spice up the ranks of their enemies, Dragonlance introduced the draconians, a race of mutant dragon men created by corrupting the eggs of good dragons. They were cannon fodder in the early stories, but two authors decided to write a series of short stories and novels focusing on a draconian named Kang and his comrades.

These started out as comedic short stories about put-upon workmen, before transitioning into an oddly touching pair of novels about draconians leaning to define themselves as an independent people despite being created as servants of evil. It's a very cute series, even if they are not well-written. Again, my interest is not something I want to spread around, but my preference is genuine.

I wish I could have grown up reading better fantasy or being encouraged to, but I really do love those stories, and a couple of other short stories that I decided were still worth keeping around. One of my favourites is "Aurora's Eggs", a creation myth about one dragon defeating five of her evil counterparts alone.

Goodbye.

Yesterday, Ray Bradbury died. I had spent the morning remaking one of my old short stories, and later saw the news on Neil Gaiman's blog feed. As soon as I saw Bradbury's name in the header, I knew what had happened. I sat there numb for a few moments, before seeing what other sites had to say. Their memories were all fond, coming from various eras and locations, but all full of reverence.

My earliest Bradbury memory was reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school, which I had taken out by special request from our classic lit mini-library because the main library didn't have it. I didn't, and still don't, share Bradbury's distaste for new technologies and the way they eroded reading, something Bradbury would later claim was the main narrative thrust of the novel. I can't see this as the main focus over the book-burning and censorship analogy, but the distaste for technological entertainment is still there.

I was disturbed anyway, by the idea of the loss of so many books, the active destruction and even that only the "great" books would survive, since there were only so many to memorize them. Some always wish for a world in which only the greatest art is always produced, but in truth, we need the bad and the mediocre to help define greatness, not to mention value is often not connected to quality.

Since that day, I read more and more Bradbury, needing no encouragement. There was never any shortage of novels and short story collections at the library and used bookstores. I loved them. I loved his tremendous imagination, his breadth of genre, his eternally distinct voice, the prose that was so evocative--with a few simple words you could feel something exactly, and it seemed to tap-dance across the page.

The Martian Chronicles is my favourite of his works, its creativity and emotional engagement outshining the fact that it's from a bygone era of solar system interpretation. The Mars of Bradbury's imagination never existed, but we like to visit it.

A voice in the back of my head reminds me that this reverence may seem odd, when Ray Bradbury's work is also steeped in boyish Americana, and a nostalgia for a time that may never have existed, or only existed in a child's mind. I have never been male or American, and I'm not a reactionary, but somehow I still "got it", even if he never intended me to.

From reading his non-fiction, I also get the impression that Bradbury was one of those men who saw women as serene beings, "complete" onto themselves and concerned only with the practical business of daily life, while men were creatures of dreaming and imagination, deprecatingly viewed as not "whole" when compared to women, but nonetheless responsible for every fantastical desire. It's a view I can never totally forgive Bradbury for, but my interest in him remains.

If anyone has ever wondered why I post so sporadically, it's because I want to be a fiction writer, and am currently trying to bring several short stories and novels up to par so that I can start. Ray Bradbury was one of my literary inspirations, and I wish that I could have had the chance to meet him. He was not everything I wanted to be, but he was many of those things, with his skillful writing, his extreme earnestness, and love of dinosaurs and the written word.

The Last Robotech Novel [That I Read Out of Order]

I have an ambivalent relationship with the series of Robotech novels, based on the 1980s anime mash-up. On one hand, some of the novels introduced concepts that helped to soothe the various issues I had with the way other continuities handled my favourite characters and things, and also provided me with fanfic fodder. On the other, the novels are generally poorly-written, and also do horrible things with my own favourite concepts. It's a conundrum.

Because of this, I dragged my feet on finding the last two "Lost Generation" Robotech novels, the trio of "midquels" written when James Luceno was the only living half of the "Jack McKinney" duo. The other "Lost Generation" novel, The Zentraedi Rebellion, is, as I've said before, one with which I've made lemons out of lemonade, and which was founded on a solid concept.

However, The Zentradi Rebellion suffered from the same basic problems as the other two novels, which are excessive "grittiness", and redundancy. I'm sure they also mess with continuity, too, but I'm not so invested that I would spend time figuring out how exactly they do.

Recently, I managed to find the last of the "Lost Generation" novels, The Master's Gambit, in a used bookstore. It actually precedes Before the Invid Storm, which I read beforehand, but my apathy should be a clue as to why that doesn't matter too much. I read The Master's Gambit in three days, feeling the urge to wash my hands of it but unable to stop reading. It's one of the few times I've succumbed to that nerd disease known as completism.

The three novels roughly correspond with each "generation" of Robotech, and this one is parallel to the middle-segment Robotech Masters series. A lot of its content is supposedly based on Robotech: the Untold Story, a movie combining the anime film Megazone 23 and other footage to create a Robotech movie that never saw a wide release. I cop to not seeing either Megazone 23 or Robotech: the Untold Story, and look at this novel in terms of how it fits into the overall scheme of what I do know.

While others may not accept the spot-welding of three unrelated anime series, the world portrayed in The Master's Gambit seems even farther afield from the common ground the original series supposedly had. The more familiar world of military politics and impending alien arrival, is combined with a story about hackers, information trading, and neo-yakuza in future Tokyo, sending readers off-balance.

What The Master's Gambit does add to the plot and characters is almost universally, unrelentingly, bleak. This is a problem of all three "Lost Generation" novels, and I might as well re-articulate it here. The mainline novels already tried to up the sexual and violence quotient from the edited anime, but the Lost Gen novels go up higher, and add so much cynicism to them.

For example, there is the portrayal of Dana Sterling as a "wild child" which includes "seducing" the older Terry Weston, which is pretty wrong and horrible. An older man doesn't get "seduced" by a teen, okay? I don't care what erotic fanfic you like to write. Terry Weston was the protagonist of a minor Robotech comic series, so I'm not caring about the stain on his reputation, but it all sounds like something added to make the novel "edgy" without larger consideration. It simply doesn't compute with the world of Robotech to have this type of storyline, nor does it match with the cheery, peppy Dana Sterling of the animated series. Pair this with the very broken understanding of statutory rape, and we have a barrel of fun here.

(Another odd thing about the novel is that Luceno likes to pepper the Japan sequences with Japanese terms and phrases, most of which are translated, but it still reads like a bad anime fanfic. There is also a character named "Misa", which might be a reference to the original Macross.)

This is totally unsurprising given my Zentradi obsession, but the extremely dour perception of what would happen to the Zentradi stood out the most to me. However, even if you don't have any particular sentimental attachment to the Zentradi as a concept or as characters, their fate nicely shows the underlying problems of the "Lost Generation" novels, and is the example of lazy writing.

Yeah, the main series of novels did stupid things with the Zentradi, too, but the last two "Lost Generation" novels really do exceed them. They portray a world in which the humanity and human contact that the allied Zentradi wanted, everything they defected for, has completely gone to shit, due to a combination of xenophobic government policy, and the Zentradi's own inability to escape an ennui that comes with no longer being warriors. To that end, they have all self-exiled themselves to the non-functional Factory Satellite, where they basically sit around and wait to die, their only action taken being to become a sacrifice to protect the Earth.

Now, plenty of stories have been written to end in absolute failure, usually to make a larger philosophical statement. And I can see where Luceno might have gotten some of his ideas from: the later episodes of the TV series do show Zentradi having problems adjusting to human life, including turning on their allies and being unable to know what to do with their lives. However, there are still the questions of tone and quality to consider.

Macross is, even in the Robotech-dubbed form, a series about hope and sweetness and taking silly things seriously. It doesn't shy away from displaying the darker aspects to life, but that is only to bring its idealistic nature somewhat back down to earth. A grim tale of failure doesn't organically follow from a series about love triangles and giant alien fanboys. Problems with the Zentradi come off as bumps in the road, nothing to define the entire allied race or their future.

Furthermore, if a bleak ending is not justified by anything deeper than "Life's a bitch and then you die", it just seems like the author ran out of things to actually do with the characters or ways to build up their world/plot, and decided to just be lazy instead.

Conveniently, the only Zentraedi who could give lie to this perception of their race's future are either gone or dead. I'm still sore about Rico, Bron, and Konda being killed off due to an unexplained illness, but at least they were treated with some level of sentimentality and respect. The last two Lost Generation novels name-drop these characters but without any of that sentimentality, or dwelling on how their actions (spearheading a rebellion against their oppressive military structure and never being a danger to humanity) might contradict the views seen in these novels.

The basic idea is instead that even if the Zentradi thought they wanted freedom from the military lifestyle, their own instincts betrayed them even more than humanity's political backlash did. There is even a scene where Rolf Emerson, Dana's surrogate father and caretaker, actually pauses to wonder if Dana's temperamental behaviour is the result of her Zentradi genes, and the "gentle" genes from her human father helped to temper them. And this is supposed to be a heroic character? It doesn't manifest in his treatment of Dana at all, but it's still jarring.

It is particularly shocking because the Sentinels novels, which run parallel to these books, but were written before, have a much more sentimental treatment of the canonical Zentradi characters. There are several wrong-headed moves made, such as Breetai sacrificing himself to end a karmic cycle of violence, and Miriya quitting the military, but a reader gets the impression we're meant to care about these characters, and they're meant to be happy/doing the right thing. I wonder if these ideas were the product of Brian Daley, and Luceno had the darker vision of the Zentradi?

Another place where this is evident is in the portrayal of Exedore, my favourite character in the whole thing. In the Sentinels novels, he is presented as a benign figure, participating happily in scientific and social endeavours and having an amicable nature. In The Zentradi Rebellion, he is cynical and harsh instead. Now, I decided to interpret this as his jackassery being intentional, but a result of stress and an over-applied pragmatism, plus the mean streak that he already displayed in "Blitzkrieg", all that he eventually learned better from to become the nicer Sentinels Exedore. However, now I can easily see that these are simply two different views of the same character, without any intention of progression.

I might be generous and say that as far back as Carl Macek's original plans for a Robotech sequel, which these novels are based on, he wanted to suggest the Zentradi were very low in number, and that, due to the speed of novel production, Luceno just came up with something on the fly, without considering the larger implications involved. Even so, the results as well as the circumstances should be looked at critically.

And anyway, if the line is that Robotech is all one series, why try to get rid of elements from the first "season" when these elements could be integrated into the whole with a novel version, enhancing that perceived unity? It doesn't make sense. (An alternative explanation is simply that Macek was considering the total proportion of Zentradi, allied and not, who died, which in this case, the remaining defectors would be smaller in number, in comparison to the original intact, living army).

Are there any good things in this novel? Actually, I thought that Luceno's world-building, his little allusions into how societies and social hierarchies have changed after the near-apocalypse were interesting, actually feeling as though they were part of a developed setting that offered enough glimpses to make a reader feel satisfied without overwhelming them with exposition. The military and political manoeuvring would have been fascinating to read about if it did not enhance the character relationships in the TV series, and really didn't have that large an impact on the overall narrative. Nor does the part of the story with the Robotech Masters offer anything more about the race's vaguely-explained backstory. If the narrative had gone more places with these things, it would have been more fulfilling.

I would like to think that even if I had read these two novels while working through the strongest stages of my Robotech obsession, I would still be able to use the good things the other novels provided for me with a clear "conscience". However, I wouldn't like to try out that hypothesis, and am glad they were both encountered later, because god only knows the vast quantities of nerdrage they would have inspired when my interest was at its peak.

The Lair of the Pterobat's Top Ten Dragon Books

I've been a dragon fan my whole life. There's just something about the flexibility of the dragon image, with so many different shapes and intelligence levels, yet all of them being fundamentally recognizable as a dragon. Compared to many other monsters, there much less of an idea of what a dragon "ought" to be, and so there is a much wider spectrum of possibility without having to deal with flack at the same time.

Books have always been my primary connection to dragon lore, there being comparatively few movies and television series that focus around them. I tend to prefer stories about dragons rather than stories with dragons, although I'm flexible. I also enjoy a good coffee-table book of dragon art, although with so much dragon out there, I tend to get picky about designs and styles instead of embracing them all equally.

Here are ten dragon books of various types that helped nurture my interest in winged, fire-breathing reptiles. It's meant to be a personalized list rather than an overview, which is why books like The Hobbit or the Pern series are not included. I know what role those books played in founding fantasy literature and in determining the common characteristics of modern dragons, but I never loved them as much as I've done these other books, nor have they had as large an influence on me.

1. The Black Wing by Mary Kirchoff

The Black Wing is the literal number one, my all-time favourite dragon novel. This is a little embarrassing because it's a Dragonlance novel, that series of Tolkien-knockoff RPG tie-ins that fantasy readers are supposed to use as literary training wheels. However, The Black Wing is not the typical Dragonlance story, and there are practical as well as nostalgic reasons that it became like that ratty old teddy bear that you wouldn't throw away.

It's about a dragon named Khisanth, who dreams of doing great things but constantly screws up and never learns from her mistakes, and in the end, is exiled to an underground city where she will be killed by incoming heroes. Much of this anti-heroic arc seems unintentional, more a matter of the writer throwing out random plot points, but it makes for a striking contrast to most RPG tie-in novels, and justifies my interest. Clichéd fantasy rarely has characters who suffer from a complete lack of self-awareness, and whose endings amount to such mundane bleakness.

This and other factors make my favourite dragon in all of fiction. It's primarily because her story is so different from any other dragon story I've read, but also for her vivid personality, which is a combination of a bratty child's and a sadistic carnivore's. Khisanth also still has a dragon's traditional power and menace, providing an intriguing contrast to her constant failures, and satisfying my usual urge to have dragons who are to a point imposing. Khisanth basically defines what I wanted to see from sapient dragons: provided with a sense of power, but also with flawed "human" personalities.

Funnily, The Black Wing is actually a prequel. Khisanth originally appeared in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first Dragonlance novel, in which she was a generic obstacle for the heroes to defeat. Her backstory and motivation was apparently invented whole cloth by The Black Wing, and is one of the few times when something like that worked. It was only years later that I discovered this, and Khisnath's entire story came together: The Black Wing was just counting down to her ignominious death. I would prefer The Black Wing to have been original and self-contained, but you can't have everything. As it is, the novel can be read while knowing nothing of Dragonlance history, since the fantasy background is generic enough and the novel gives one all the information they could need, but it misses the completion of Khisanth's folly.

2. The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

I'm cheating a little bit here, since the titular dragon is not the main focus of the book. Rather, he is a dark, perpetual presence in the life of Jane, a human girl stolen to fairyland, which has modernized along with the world outside. However, the mechanical dragon-jet Melanchthon is such an unforgettably devilish presence that I couldn't think of listing my favourite dragon books without acknowledging this novel.

Melanchthon is pure, delicious evil. While he usually does not act directly, he still manipulates. There is nothing cheesy or overwrought about him: a reader believes in his evil utterly and completely. This is especially notable because I swear up and down that I dislike writing dragons as purely saintly or demonic, but Melanchthon manages to get past my defences.

The Iron Dragon's Daughter is also a favourite novel in general. The imagining of modern faerie is strange and vivid, and though the book is very dark and often depraved, it does not feel gratuitously so. Because Jane's final reward is to return home from this bizarre, brooding world, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is also an excitingly vicious attack on changeling fantasies and pastoral fantasy journeys, but can simply be read as its own very strange story.

3. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! was the first Discworld novel I ever read. I originally picked it up because of the dragon angle, but stayed with the rest of the series because of how funny and sophisticated it was. This book introduced the original Night Watch characters, including Sam Vimes, and they're great characters, too: the Night Watch books remain my favourite Discworld sub-series.

 But, I'll admit, it's still the dragon angle that gives Guards! Guards! an extra flavour. A typical fantasy dragon is summoned to the city of Ankh-Morpork, to use as a weapon to change the structure of government. But things get out of hand, while the washed-up remains of the City Watch try to deal with the intrusion into their not-really-all-that-fair city.

The novel takes apart the classical dragon story to show just how absurd its aspects are: a functional dragon must either "cheat" the laws of physics by constantly absorbing magic, or be a tiny chemical-filled beastie with a tendency towards exploding. A city gets along (relatively) fine without a dragonslayer-king, or is just screwed up enough to make a dragon its king. The best sacrificial maiden is a middle-aged keeper of dragon kennels, raising small dragons in a parody of championship dog breeding. And so on. It's a well-constructed story with multiple levels of humour and a surprise ending.

4. Miss Fanshawe and the Great Dragon Adventure by Sue Scullard

This is a picture book that haunted my childhood from grade school onward. Explorer Harriet Fanshawe captures a dragon and her egg for display on the Buckingham Palace grounds, only to have the egg stolen by a pterosaur-bird that Fanshawe chases into the bowels of the Earth. The Earth's core is heated by the constant fire of captured dragons, but Fanshawe manages to rescue the new hatchling and ride him to the surface. Monstrous animals kill the birds pursuing them, until they arrive safely at the Palace, where the dragons are soon set free.

Many pages have a hole in the middle that offers a peek into the next image, with all the art aligning perfectly, such flying doves becoming the pattern upon a giant serpent. The art is wonderful, sumptuously detailed while often being stylized. I was fascinated by the dragons and the ptero-birds, but also the giant serpent, the huge panther with a hide full of eye-spots, and the cobweb-festooned underground city. Some examples here.

5.    Dragoncharm/Dragonstorm/Dragonflame by Graham Edwards

Graham Edward's UK trilogy of novels, billed pompously as "The Ultimate Dragon Saga" details the multi-part transformation of the world from a mythical prehistory into the patterns we know it today, in which most of the cast members are dragons. It begins with a war between magic-using and non-magical dragons, with the main character being the orphan "Natural" dragon Fortune, but soon evolves into the larger storylines, as various dragons try to seize power during these transitions.

My feelings about these are books are mixed. On one hand, the novels suffer from flat characters whose traits and development are often told rather than shown, while many other characters are entirely generic or unchanging. For example, I struggle to describe what kind of personality Fortune actually has, and he is the main character. On the other, there is tremendous imagination put into the imagery and concepts, and I get sucked in time after time. I like these novels, but they're far from flawless.

Other readers might be put off by the very Disney feel to the novels, combining sentimental softness with scenes of livid darkness. These dragons also lack their traditional power, being relatively small creatures (roughly the size of men), and very much at the mercy of the tremendous forces around them. This is deliberate, since the author set out to write something more along the lines of an animal fantasy such as Watership Down, which includes some presumptions of vulnerability. It doesn't quite sit well with me, but the novels are still entertaining.

6.    The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson

Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons might be the oldest entry in the "Author Outlines a Concept for a Dragon Species and Places it in a Richly-Illustrated Book" sub-sub genre of dragon books, and it's still one of the best. Modern audiences might be more familiar with his concept as integrated into the Rankin-Bass animated film The Flight of Dragons, but I would recommend the book to anyone whether or not they've seen the film, since the book goes into far greater detail, and is also a darker and less romantic picture of dragons than the animated version.

Peter Dickisnon's dragons are non-sapient, living dirigibles of sorts, whose fire breath, poisonous blood, and flight ability are all part of an elaborate chemical system inside an almost hollow body. He outlines many of the physical problems inherent to dragons as we imagine them, and the new problems inherent to dragons as he imagines them (they are creatures of great power, but also of a delicate and volatile physiology).

The text is a fascinating read, making its reasoning clear without scientific jargon. Dickinson tries to demonstrate the way that these biological dragon traits have been interpreted in legends, forming a strong picture of an imaginary dragon species. Sometimes he creates traits that seem biologically unsound in order to match with the stories, such as introducing innate cannibalism into an already small population, but it is overall a sound concept.

As a side note, what we consider "dragons" are actually the males of the species, with the females being flightless, amphibious, and humanoid, which will be a disappointment to some female dragon fans, even if Dickinson does explain it. Female dragons are only illustrated twice in the book, and not as clearly.

Wayne Anderson's artwork deserves a special mention. His male dragons are huge, but with fat bodies, finlike wings, and short, thin limbs. While Dickinson presents the illustrations as theoretical constructions (speculating that the tubular shape of a Chinese dragon could actually be more accurate), they match well with his descriptions, not to mention being wonderful on their own. Anderson gives beauty to the unromantic dragon designs, with stylized forms full of eccentric detail. There are plenty of incidental illustrations and page garnishes that are also beautiful, even if they don't match with the text or anything else in the book.

7.    The Book of the Dragon by Ciruelo Carabal (art) and Montse Sant (text)

Unlike The Flight of Dragons, where the centrepiece is Dickinson's text, The Book of the Dragon is designed first and foremost to showcase Ciruelo's dragon art. Choosing The Flight of Dragons to rank higher is not a matter of preferring text over art, however, but because Cireulo's and Montse Sant's conception of dragons is far more typical than Dickinson's, in both visual and written terms.

The art is the book's greatest strength. In contrast to Wayne Anderson's quirky style, the Ciruelo dragon is the quintessential modern dragon: four legs, two bat wings, a sleek body, long muzzle, finned ears, and back-pointing horns. I chose Dickinson's living blimps above these ones because of their uniqueness, but there's also something comforting about the more traditional design, and Ciruelo's is a gorgeously drawn rendition.

However, where the book loses points is in the text. Written by Montse Saint (though the credit is absent from some covers), unclear how much of it was Ciruelo's idea, it is a largely bland overview of a dragon species. The worst parts are the syrupy passages about dragons as saintly figures of unspoilt nature, rendered extinct by nebulous human folly. This image of dragons is as bad as that of dragons as rampaging monsters, since both are too boring and simple.

There's also this weird idea that female dragons are incredibly rare, and that as a result, the male dragons, must "share" the scarce females in a mating flight after which she mates with one, quickly lays an egg, and goes to the next male, a succession in which only one female egg is conceived. As a result of this lack of mates, male dragons develop attachments to human females, which they keep as pampered, bejewelled "pets" and may fall in love with (especially in the case of the soft-hearted Water Dragons). This was likely used to explain several mythological tropes, but it's still creepy and makes no biological sense.

Part of the book is also devoted to retellings of dragon legends, which are often sanitized, or rewritten to include their conceptual dragon species. For example, the legend of Hercules and the Golden Apples has Ladon the dragon survive and lecture the hapless Atlas; retelling the legend of Sybaris explicitly refers to the antagonist as a Water Dragon of Ciruelo's breed. The book also recalls modern dragon stories: Tolkien, Earthsea, and, for some reason, Dragonlance, though these get a few pages each and are filled with inaccuracies.

8.    The Dragon Book: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

I have read several dragon anthologies over the years, including Dragon Fantastic, Dragons of Light, Dragons of Darkness, and A Dragon-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic. All of them have had great stories, forgettable ones, and bad ones. However, The Dragon Book, although not perfect, has a notable number of creative and interesting dragon stories, and so needed a place on this list.

9.    Saint George and The Dragon, Retold by Margaret Hodges and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, adapted from Edmund Speser's The Farie Queene

Like many modern dragon fans, I don't have much taste for the standard tale of dragonslaying. It's not about the evil men being mean to the poor saintly dragons, but that it's a pretty simple, white, predictable story. Hodges and Hyman's version of the Saint George legend, however, manages to succeed through the sheer power of Hyman's art, which gives a powerful and somehow melancholy feel to the story, even though there are no surprises in the plot. Hyman's dragon, in particular, though it is only seen on three pages (including the cover) has a striking appearance that makes one consider whether a dragon is best saved for the climax, too majestic to appear otherwise.

10.    A Book Dragon by Don Kushner

We close off this list with something that lacks theoretical artistic merit, and just makes me happy. A Book Dragon is a children's novel about a young dragon named Nonesuch, who discovers that dragons shrink by not eating (!), and eventually makes his home inside an illuminated manuscript, adopting it as his dragon treasure. He stays with the book as it changes hands throughout human history, chatting sometimes with the spirit of his cynical grandmother. It's a charming little story that speaks to my inner bibliophile, even if the ending involves Nonesuch returning to a large size to devour the man who wants to foreclose the used bookshop that his book now resides in. I can't stand that kind of corporation vs. little guy cheesiness, but it can't spoil the whole book.

Honourable Mentions:

Anne McAffrey and John Howe's A Diversity of Dragons has sumptuous illustrations by Howe, but there were not enough of them, and frequently featured unappealing squat or wormlike dragons, sometimes appearing only in the corners of drawings. I also didn't like the framing story, where a man who may have a dragon on his property goes to McAffrey for help, and she and her friend Eppie end up taking the farmer on a crash course in dragon stories, trying to determine what the man has found. It just seemed like a weird self-aggrandizement by McAffrey, especially since her own novels are also spotlighted and given an illustration by Howe.

Patricia C. Werde's Dealing with Dragons is a fun book, and its dragons are likable, but there's not enough that's striking about it as a "dragon story". It's also more Cimorene's story than Kazul's, anyway.

E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series has some very good ideas, and I  love the way the character of the Copper started, but the six novels ultimately feel stretched-out and, despite being very high-concept, mostly unmemorable. So many scenes and character arcs lack ultimate payoff, and many plot threads are tied up too quickly.

Chris Cymri's Dragon Reforged is like The Black Wing in that it's a cheap, forgotten novel that manages to tug at a dragon-lover's heartstrings. It's about an android dragon and his quest for humanity, which is a good hook, but the story feels not quite whole. Furthermore, I haven't read the first part of the story, found in the novel, Dragons Can Only Rust, and I should see them both to make a final decision about their quality.

Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw does get points for novelty, trying for a Victorian romance starring slightly anthropomorphic dragons, but I didn't feel any strong resonance with it. It's a good novel, just not one I want to put on a pedestal.

Dark. Place.

A friend of mine recced me this show, and wow…just…amazing. A 6-episode series, originally on Channel 4 in the UK, it's a fictitious writer's equally fictitious vanity project. Matthew Holness plays horror writer "Garth Merenghi", the lead in a sf/horror medical drama based on his own books, taking place in "Darkplace Hospital". It aired in 2004, just before Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital series debuted in the US, and I wonder what the story is there, since the two are very close in concept.

This short series is distinguished by deliberately bad acting and deliberately bad special effects, along with Merhengi's ponderous monologues and obvious tendency to portray "himself" as a Gary Stu. Merhengi also cast his publisher (played by Richard Ayoade) in another of the lead roles, too. Episodes are broken up by short interviews with the actors, addressing their show-within-a-show characters and the universe it plays in. It's all very meta on meta. It's also meant to be shot as a 1980s series, despite airing in 2004, and the film has that gauzy, soap-opera look that matches its contents.

Stephen King is probably the man parody target, both because Merhengi is a horror writer, and because of King's penchant for making cameos in media based on his books. However, Holness also bears a striking resemblance to a young Harlan Ellison, and my friend also suggested that his billing himself as a "dream weaver" might be a reference to Neil Gaiman.

The humour is simple, but it works, and I'd recommend anybody give this a shot. There is also a small website.

Hill House, Not Sane

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has become a personal icon of mine, one of my all-time favourite novels. It is unconventional in a way that I like, restrained admirably but layered with irony and still genuinely creepy, and overall a wonderful piece of literature. I'm a fan of Jackson's work in general, but this is the top.

However, I had the grave misfortune of seeing Jan de Bont's 1999 film version of The Haunting of Hill House before anything else. Fortunately, it didn't stick with me, didn't colour my later interest in the novel and the first film.

In fact, it's a pretty blessing that I forgot about 1999 version, because this recent review by The Nostalgia Critic shows me what I couldn't recognize before: not only is it a genuinely bad movie (all I remembered that the house looked bitchin' cool and nothing else was memorable), but it is horribly contradictory to the spirit of the original book, having big scares and a main character who becomes an actual heroine.

Besides that unknowing blunder, my history with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House began when I took an interest in Stephen King's non-fiction book Danse Macabre, a book I'd picked up in the tornado of King obsession when I was a kid, but never read because I had discovered it was non-fiction. As an adult, though, it's a great read, an overview of the horror genre that is part informal criticism, part memoir.

King makes much of Shirley Jackson's book, coming back to it several times when discussing haunted house stories. Yet what stood out to me above everything else was his excerpt of the book's first line: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." It's such a wonderful line, expressing, in Jackson's excellent style, that fantasy is intrinsic to existence. It also composes part of one of the most effective openings I've ever read, engaging the reader while giving away so little. We are left to wonder how this relates to Hill House, which then is described as "not sane".

The entire book is fascinating. Firstly, it is an interesting take on the haunted house story: slow and introspective, but it works so well, better in that form, in fact, because it is more unusual. I'm not a big horror reader, but I love brooding stories if the characters are compelling. The Haunting of Hill House is also layered with irony: while the scares are genuine, there is little real sympathy for the mousy protagonist.

The Haunting of Hill House offers no such easy paths, of course, but if we were to measure things in degrees, Eleanor just feels like she is less meant to be loved than simply pitied, or even perhaps hated. She is a child in an adult's body, and easily taken (figuratively and literally) by the house, which she is convinced loves her. Her immaturity and her giving into the house is not tragic but blackly comedic. It is clear that her personality is the result of her terrible home life, but nonetheless, she is at fault, and cannot escape. We just watch Eleanor, a bug inside the terrarium, with a clinical tilt of our heads. I don't love Eleanor, but I enjoy watching her self-destruction.

It's a fascinatingly different way to handle a protagonist, and it's what makes the 1999 Eleanor's transformation into passionate heroine so painful to see. It's completely a misfire, turning her into something crass and...uh, "common", especially when nobody seems to realize the stupidity of a woman who's been crushed by her own family unironically using the force of familial love to banish the horrible father-demon.  Jan de Bont can't even make Eleanor's spine-growth convincing, either. This is why we have people who hate adaptations, folks.

Robert Wise's original 1963 version, however, is far better. It is elegant and effective, complementing the book perfectly, not only through faithfulness, but in simply being good. I've been able to track down a DVD copy, and look forward to watching it, in the spirit of the season.

The Peculiar Olympians: Khisanth

“The Peculiar Olympians” is a series of blog posts about my most favourite fictional characters. They are each here for some combination of sympathy, empathy, inspiration, humour, quality, staying power, and/or significance to my relationship with fandom. These are not all the characters that I like, but they are the ones that have stood out to me the most. The list is also alphabetical and nothing more.

I’ve loved dragons since before I can remember, but I can also be extremely picky about them. Usually I’m not interested in saintly magical companions or creatures of absolute evil, and keep hunting for something a little bit more interesting.

However, it’s surprisingly easy for me to pick just one dragon character as my favourite: Khisanth, from the novel The Black Wing by Mary Kirchoff. She’s from the Dragonlance series of books, which I know are mostly drivel, but Khisanth’s portrayal is that kind of happy cosmic accident that Peculiar Olympians are sometimes made of.

Khisanth is a black-scaled dragon, which in this setting means she is greedy and impulsive, breathes green acid, and prefers swampy, wet areas. She is the offspring of Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, along with four other chromatic dragon breeds. Khisanth was at some point ordered to go underground and sleep after her Queen’s defeat in a war, waking up an adult, after which she wandered the world and had several adventures, before being exiled to an underground city to guard a magical artifact.

Khisanth, a.k.a. Onyx, is far better known as the minor antagonist that appeared in the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. In that book, she is an utterly generic villain, easily dispatched through the touch of a magical staff that turns her to ash, the same one she was to guard. The Black Wing is then a prequel, written by a different author, though it was years before I understood this, having completely avoided the founding Dragonlance books in favour of reading stories about dragons.

Normally these conditions would be several kisses of death to a book’s quality, but what emerges instead is a new take on a generic fantasy world, told through the viewpoint of an evil minion, one who is a tragic but also aggravatingly stupid anti-hero. Khisanth in the book has a personality that’s a combination of a spoiled child and a sadist carnivore, but manages to be sympathetic because she is capable of forming friendships, and does not directly serve evil until the final third of the book. Even then, because it’s from her viewpoint and before the latest war truly begins, it’s harder to see her as a mere villain.

Furthermore, Khisanth’s life is horrible. She regularly makes huge mistakes and never learns from them, and in the end fate throws her together with a human that she despises, one who murdered Khisanth’s friend and comrade because he felt Khisanth was a more worthy dragon. This is an assignment which she eventually breaks in the worst way, killing the man when she is sure that history is about to repeat itself. Yet Khisanth continually believes that she has a great destiny in store for herself. Readers who have read the original novel know exactly what is in store for Khisanth, and that tinges The Black Wing with a sense of clumsy tragedy.

Khisanth is my ideal dragon character because she operates between two extremes. She is like the “monstrous” dragon in terms of power, but instead of being a plot device, something saved for the climax, she is a protagonist. Unlike the saintly companion dragon, she actually has flaws, and in a subversive twist, refuses to have a rider until fate intervenes. Furthermore, with humans to contrast herself against, she retains some dragon grandeur, rather than being a talking animal as in some dragon-viewpoint books. Thus far, none of the professional and original dragon characters that I’ve read have managed to achieve this kind of potent mixture. Part of me does wish something  like Khisanth emerged in an original work, but I’m usually content to accept what it is.

Making the Most

I forgot to mark the third year of my unusual relationship with Robotech. This is unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected, given that I’ve just been recovering from a bad patch with the fandom.

Over recent months, the many contradictions and disappointments in my fandom and Macross fandom had started to wear on me, leading to a phase where I spent more time wishing that my fandom experience were different, and mulling over my critical feelings towards the same, than enjoying what reality had given me.

I began to be overwhelmed by my (still valid) critiques of the Robotech novels and comics that had once been the building blocks of my interest, and by several other things that I won’t get into right now. I never considered turning my back on the novels, but I subconsciously tried to downplay their importance in forming my own fandom.

Thankfully, my friend John “Zen72” Thomas then released the last episode of his Robotech podcast, The Protoculture Times. Much, much longer than the other episodes, it contained re-run interviews and new ones, and was a great way to go out with a bang.

Zen is far more enthused about the Robotech novels than I am, and hearing him wax poetic about them brought back the feelings I had once had, before critical analysis kicked in. It brought my “spirit” back, even if my criticisms remained.

This was despite the fact that when he interviewed James Luceno, one half of the writing group which penned these novels. When Zen opened e-mail questions for Luceno, with the disclaimer that Luceno didn’t remember much, I tried to put forth a general question, to look like I was not one of those who expected the writers to remember everything. I wanted to understand some of the decisions made about the portrayal of the Zentraedi, the good choices and the bad ones.

Still, the response I received was what I had expected: the plots which had had such an impact on my fandom were strongly suggested to have been decisions made off the cuff, or ones whose motivation was lost in the mists of time. Given the speed at which those books were written that’s not surprising, but it’s still sobering to be reminded of the difference between authorial intent and my reaction.

What that in turn might mean is that, more than any other fandom, I’ve been left to my own devices, to make the fiction I wanted to have out of the stuff I’ve been given, for official material alone always bothers me in some profound way. It’s a sad state of affairs, when usually I’m a shaking canon junkie, but that’s the truth.

Still, somehow, taking a dip back into the McKinneyverse was needed to rejuvenate my nerddom. It’s a figurative dip, though. My increased critical sensibility didn’t vanish, and it does

What the novels gave to me was an extension and completion of certain characters. You know that I like Exedore, Breetai, Rico, Bron, and Konda the best, and the novels, no matter how clumsily, or inaccurately, showed these characters had hearts and minds worth delving into, and could complete their character arcs from the original series. Most of the rest of fandom seems to treat these characters as plot devices, but it’s not unreasonable to see them otherwise.

I later began to realize that their treatment was in truth not entirely rosy, but there are still moments worth preserving. I can spend my time thinking about what I would have done, or I could take what is given, but it is much easier to call back those positive feelings for the novels, and their strength has returned.

No matter how disinterested I am in the rest of the Robotech continuations, it would be stupid to put on a stoic face and pretend I was never energized by these books. This kind of thing is hard to explain to other fans, but it’s good to remember how true it is for me. I still want to be that person who waxes poetic about Sentinels Exedore, or who thinks Kazianna Hesh is her favourite female Zentraedi character, and thought parts of End of the Circle were actually fascinating.