Category: Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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Have you ever realized that an elegant solution to an age-old question was sitting right in front of you? Or rather, had just left town for an undisclosed reason? My point: I think I know how the proverbial “Slayer army” can come into being.

Here’s the problem: Buffy is, for all intents and purposes, the Slayer, but as we’ve seen, when she dies, no new Slayer gets called. The line goes through Faith, who as far as we know is currently in jail. So, barring prison riots, getting any new Slayers by killing off Faith seems problematic at best, especially when you take into account that she’s slated to appear on both shows sometime this season. Doing what some people have suggested is possible, and creating a “Slayer army” by deliberately flatlining and then reviving Faith and each subsequently called Slayer, seems more plausible at this juncture than ever before, given the crowd of potentials hanging out in Sunnydale. But how to accomplish this?

Enter Gwen. We’ve seen her shock Gunn to death and then back to life, and she’s not contractually bound to appear on only one of the two shows. It wouldn’t take much for her to show up, not know anything about Faith, and kill her, then revive her when someone in the hotel goes berserk upon walking in a few seconds later. (Or any other scenario you can come up with, it doesn’t really matter.) Then you get a phone call from Sunnydale saying that one of the potentials just über-whupped a teammate in a practice session, and does Angel know anything? and Faith and Gwen eventually hightail it off to the Summers residence. Presto: Slayer army.

But how to get Faith out of jail? That one’s easy. L.A. has descended into eternal darkness, and vampire armies are looking for recruits. What better place to find people already turned to the dark side than a prison? And imagine their surprise when one of their candidates starts slaying her way out. Now there’s a teaser sequence I’d like to see.

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I’m beginning to understand why someone would jump out of a bathtub and go streaking through the streets with a fantastic new idea. Recently, in the shower, my brain decided it wanted to write a graphic novel. The day after, it worked out a genetic explanation of channeling in the Wheel of Time universe. If you haven’t read any Robert Jordan, or if you don’t know basic genetics, this won’t make a huge lot of sense. If you’ve read some but not all, be warned that this explanation contains information you may not have reached. None of it is serious, but if you’re a fanatic about not being spoiled, watch out. I’ll break the article before I get into speculation that people might not have heard or want to hear.

Here’s my model. There are three factors controlling channeling ability: whether you can do it, whether you have the spark or can learn, and how strong you are. Strength and sparkiness don’t seem to be related, and neither seems to be related to sex. What I propose is that basic channeling ability is a recessive, sex-linked trait. There are variations of a gene on both the X and Y chromosomes, X’ and Y’ to borrow from Katherine Kurtz, that enable awareness of, respectively, saidar and saidin. In order to channel, someone has to have this variation on both their sex chromosomes. So an X’Y male can’t channel, but an X’Y’ can. X’X women and X’Y or XY’ men can’t even sense the Source. The elegant part of this is that it explains why men who can channel or learn can sense when a woman is channeling: they have the X’. It also explains why channeling-capable men can only tell other men can channel when they do it, while women have an easy time telling when other women can channel (sensing other Aes Sedai, seeing the glow, knowing who’s sparky), since they have double sensitivity to saidar.

Sparkiness is easy compared to that. It seems to be a simple dominant-recessive or absent-present allele situation. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are two possible places on non-X-or-Y chromosomes that the allele (call it “spontaneity,” S for absent and s for present) can appear. If someone has one, and all other genetic markers are in order, he/she is a learner; two means he/she has the spark. This makes for a very easy Punnett square giving about twice as many sul’dam as damane.

I won’t address strength, since it’s not a black-and-white issue and probably involves a lot of genes that most people just don’t use, not having the right matchups in spontaneity or sensitivity. However, I do want to look at what happens when you examine a few special families…. Continue reading →

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of articles in places like Time Magazine about how popular culture is abandoning science fiction for fantasy, usually tying it into either pessimism about technology and the future (“Where’s my flying car!”) or nostalgia in a post-9/11 world. They generally cite the enormous success of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as compared to, say, Star Trek: Nemesis.

Bull.

You want to know why fantasy is doing so well these days? Someone finally made some fantasy films that were good. What did we have before? Dungeons and Dragons. Krull. Sure, there were a few bright spots like The Princess Bride, but if you look at the IMDB’s Top 10 rated fantasy films there’s not one between 1980 and 2000 – and that includes The Empire Strikes Back and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

And somehow all of these articles ignore the box-office success of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones. Somehow I expect The Matrix Reloaded is going to do just fine, despite the supposed failure of sci-fi.

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OK, first I’d like to stress that I did like most of The Two Towers the first time through. It was mainly the non-ending that bugged the heck out of me, and that was the impression I was left with leaving the theater.

I can say now that not only does the movie hold up to a second viewing, it was actually more enjoyable this time around. Perhaps because I knew where it was stopping, it didn’t bother me so much that it stopped there.

One review I read lamented not seeing the developing friendship between Gimli and Legolas. That puzzled me, since I saw it even during my first viewing of the film. From Legolas ready to defend Gimli to Eomer, to their camaraderie during the battle: Legolas offering to get Gimli a box to stand on (and Gimli smiling at the joke instead of growling), their competition over who can kill more orcs, etc. Actually, that competition was one of my favorite character bits from the battle, and I was glad to see it make it to the screen.

Most of the story changes didn’t bother me much. Continue reading →

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A few months ago I read an article about filmmaking which talked about why the ending of a film is so important: it’s not just that the audiences want to see it come out a certain way, but the ending is the last impression the audience is left with. A film can be fantastic all the way through and then fall on its face at the end, and that’s the impression people will be left with.

Now I loved The Fellowship of the Ring, both the theatrical release and the special edition. I enjoyed most of The Two Towers. But the ending fell flat on its face. Helm’s deep simply stopped, and the Frodo/Sam story did nothing more than present a vague threat from Gollum.

Imagine if The Empire Strikes Back had ended not with Luke getting his replacement hand and Lando and Chewbacca heading off to rescue Han, but had instead ended with the escape from Cloud City. That’s what this felt like.

Visually, the film is amazing. The effects, the scenery, the sets, costumes and battle sequences are stunning. The acting, like last time, is excellent. And yet between the jumbled editing and the lack of an ending, the film is far less satisfying than the previous one.

I’m left with two conclusions: either New Line Cinema stepped in to “protect the franchise” instead of trusting the people who got the first one right, or they had a harder time cutting it down to three hours and made poorer choices.

At this point I’m going to bring up some specifics. Continue reading →