Regular readers of this blog would be forgiven from assuming that I neither read nor watched anything of interest for most of 2014. This is of course untrue, so the next few posts will probably be "catch-ups" of a sort.
But first, I'd like to point out that about a month ago we saw the appearance of a long-awaited Star Wars-related video - no, I'm not talking about the first The Force Awakens trailer, but rather fan-film studio Bat in the Sun's Super Power Beat Down Episode 14, "Batman Vs. Darth Vader". And man, but it was worth the wait:
Once the sheer geeky joy of seeing Batman lightsaber-dueling with Darth Vader had subsided somewhat, I was able to appreciate some of the finer details of the film. While the production values of Bat in the Sun's productions have always been high, this one really raises the bar - yes, in terms of overall special effects and set and costume design (all of which are spot on), but also in the little details, like Batman's nose bleeding after his abortive attempt to breathe in space.
Although the final result of the battle was dictated by popular vote*, I was also impressed by the writing of the piece. While it would have been nice to get some hint of the (allegedly plotted out) events that got Superman trapped on the Death Star - giving Batman the opportunity to use the "That's no moon" line was a nice bonus to picking that setting, by the way - in the first place, once the Bat-wing** docks things flow fairly logically, given a Batman with some idea of Darth Vader's capabilities. Sneaking a lightsaber (presumably Obi-Wan's, which would imply that this whole fracas takes place during the Yavin 4 briefing scenes from A New Hope) from Vader's armory was an especially good idea, though it might just be because it leads to this reveal:
"I underestimate nothing!"
Anyway, it's plain to see that this is a fan-film, in the best sense of the word - if the creative teams working on The Force Awakens and Batman V. Superman show as much obvious care for the settings and characters as Bat in the Sun has, then in terms of fan response they should have nothing to worry about.
*Not that that will stop BitS from releasing an alternate ending next month. **Never before has this alternate term for Batman's aircraft been more apt.
In some stunning news from Tesladyne Island earlier this week, the writers of the Atomic Robo comic announced that as of 2015, the comic will be transitioning from a traditional by-the-issue publishing model to a three-times-a-week webcomic. This means, among other things, that the entire 54-issue run of the comic thus far will be free to read - eventually, their plan is to release one issue a week until they catch up, starting today - and then continuing with the new stuff. Which, cleverly, they now have over a year to come up with, though as today was the expected release date for the Volume 9 trade it probably would have been about that long anyway.
Anyway, it looks like it's going to be an interesting year, to say the least, for Atomic Robo fans as things roll out. But there are still unanswered questions - such as, how long will the "Free Comics" page remain in its current form? Will the new paradigm work as well as the creators hope it will? Will it include the Real Science Adventures spin-off? Will Dr. Dinosaur ever top his firsttwo appearances?
Except perhaps the jetpack, nothing quite says "retro-futurism" like the flying car. Probably the most famous is, of course, Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine from the end of Back to the Future. In Part II, we see that the source if this technology is the year 2015, when hover-tech is built into practically everything. With 2015 now less than a year away, the odds of this particular vision of the future seems increasingly remote.
In the real world, of course, there are a myriad of reasons for this. Gravity manipulation, if even possible, is still years away, and while more mundane versions of flying cars have been developed, they still run into the problem of being much harder to use than the traditional auto.
In fiction, of course, things can get much more interesting. For example, in Captain America: The First Avenger we see Howard Stark showing off a car retrofitted with "Stark Gravitic Reversion Technology", a feat all the more impressive for being achieved in 1943.
True, it doesn't last very long, but the technology seems well-developed enough to become widespread in fairly short order. That it doesn't can, I think, be explained by this later development:
Clearly, "Gravitic Reversion" is one of the things that S.H.E.I.L.D has been keeping under wraps for all these years - Lola is, I understand, based on a 1962 model Corvette, although of course the hover-conversion could have taken place at any point subsequently. Of particular interest, to me anyway, is that Lola's transition process looks and sounds a lot like the DeLorean's. It's very tempting to conflate the two, and having hover-tech be suppressed by S.H.E.I.L.D for much of the development period explains how it becomes so widespread so soon after it becomes public.
OsCorp, though promising, was
rejected for consideration.
For obvious reasons.
Of course, when they did decide to release it S.H.E.I.L.D probably still wouldn't want to admit they'd been suppressing it, so the release would probably be done through an intermediary. About a month ago there was a flurry of interest surrounding HUVrTech, which purported to be a company that had indeed developed a Back to the Future-esque hoverboard. Of course it turned out to be a prank, though one a lot of people seem to have believed (in retrospect they should have waited until today to announce it . . . then again, they probably wouldn't have had as many people believe it if they had), but their announcement - coming December 2014! - is pretty much how I would expect things to go if a shadowy conspiracy was in charge of technological development.
For now, though, flying cars and anti-gravity skateboards remain the stuff of fiction, looking forward to the day when we really aren't going to need roads.
A month or so ago, it was announced that Win Scott Eckert, author of the Crossover Universe Timeline books I was so enthusiasticabout a couple years back, is handing off that project to one Sean Levin, who will be producing a third and fourth volume of that work.
As if that wasn't enough, yesterday the two of them - well, mostly Levin - began a new blog to chronicle the further development of the Crossover Universe. This quite exciting, and I look forward to following the progress of this new project.
Look, I'm not one of the sorts of Star Trek fans who felt betrayed or insulted by 2009's Star Trek taking the focus into a new timeline. Nor am I terribly convinced by arguments that boil down to "it has too much action to be a proper Star Trek story". And truthfully, I have very few problems with Star Trek Into Darkness as a whole - but the problems I do have a pretty central to the film.
They're also pretty spoilery, so if you haven't seen it yet you probably want to take care of that before venturing below the cut.
It's rather hard to believe, but today is the tenth anniversary of the release of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film, based on the Alan Moore comic of the same name. I never got a chance to see it in the theater, unfortunately (though I really wanted to), but once I acquired a DVD copy it quickly became one of my favorite movies, right up there with the Back to the Future and Indiana Jones films.
Sadly, the world in general does not appear to share my enthusiasm. I tend to attribute this to rampant Alan Moore fandom - he famously doesn't get on well with adaptations of his work, and LXG admittedly took rather a few more liberties than an adaptation can typically support.
But in this case, however, I think the changes work quite well. Certainly they don't distract from making the movie enjoyable to watch, in itself, and one of the chief delights of cameo- and reference-spotting remain intact.
Indeed, I credit The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen with helping to form my current interest in crossovers and shared universes, most notably the Wold Newton Universe (to which the League is tangentially related).
Anyway. I've always enjoyed the movie, and was quite disappointed a few years later when LXG2: War of the Worlds failed to materialize. Almost unbelievably, it seems that the concept might still have a chance - there are some early reports that Fox is developing the League as a television show. Details at this time are sketchy - not even to determine whether this is a reboot or a continuation of the film continuity - but I'm hopeful that whatever comes from he project will be at least as enjoyable as the movie is to me.
So yes, this is old news, but The Avengers is amazing. It takes everything that was good about the previous half-dozen Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and concentrates it down into two-and-a-half hours of what may be the best superhero movie to date.
If I had to pick one word to sum up the film, I think I would choose balanced. There are several ways that this is relevant - in terms of spectacle vs. plot, for example, the movie manages to excel at the former without it being (as is too often the case) at the expense of the latter. Also applicable is the way the film balanced the hitherto unprecedented - so far as I'm aware - team-up of heroes who previously carried four individual franchises, a feat made even more extraordinary by its success. Each one got some time in the spotlight, simultaneously continuing their stories from previous outings and emerging ready to slip back into solo-dom with minimal disruption.
Iron Man, having had around 100% more prior movie time than almost any of his team-mates, seemed to me to be the most static in terms of development, though his introduction would certainly seem to indicate his relationship with Pepper has developed from what I remember. There was also that nifty armor upgrade, which makes a nice midpoint between the backpack-armor we saw in Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3's rumored nano-tech-armor. Finally, he did have a bit of a character arc in his response to Captain America's remarks about sacrifice, and I really liked the way he insisted on interacting with Dr. Banner as a fellow scientist rather than a potential Hulk.
Then again, Hulkbuster!
Speaking of the Hulk, in some ways he had the most to overcome, with his multiple actors and somewhat uneven prior films. In a lot of ways, however, he was the breakout star of the film - certainly he was responsible for many of the film's most popular moments (such as the punching the first giant robot dragon-fish, and of course his "Puny god" line). Would these moments be enough to carry a solo film? I'm sure we'll find out eventually, but in the meantime I'm looking forward to Hulk and/or Dr. Banner making cameos in his team-mates' movies. I'd like to think, giving him going off with Tony at the end of Avengers, that Iron Man III is the most likely candidate for this, but given the trailers and early reactions to III so far I'm not holding my breath.
Other solo sequels are sounding equally good. Despite the fact that Thor was not really my favorite of the "Phase One" Marvel films, I'm very excited about the direction that the sequel is taking. Of course, part of this is because I somewhat jokingly predicted this back when the first film came out, but hey - Space Elves are cool anytime. Thor's appearance in The Avengers itself was not quite that exciting, unfortunately - his biggest roles, it seemed, were facilitating hero-on-hero brawls and contributing secondary characters, namely Loki and Dr. Selvig. Not that either of those is unimportant, but they just didn't have quite the same focus as some of the other members. It didn't help that Thor was the one who delivered what I thought was the worst line in the movie - though funny, "He's adopted" was a rather out-of-character statement, in more ways than one.
Rounding out the "Big Four" of the team is Captain America whom, more than the others, ended his last solo film on a bit of a cliffhanger. He didn't get a whole lot of a chance to catch his breath and adjust to the 21st century, either, though there are a few signs that such an adjustment is taking place - note his mention of feeling at home on the Helicarrier. More than adjusting to the times, though, we saw Cap adjusting to being part of a different team than he was used to. This will be important later, as 2014's scheduled film Captain America: The Winter Soldier sounds like it will feature not only the titular Solider (no spoilers, but that title's a giveaway for something we all knew would happen), but also Black Widow and a new hero, the Falcon. How exactly this will shake out remains to be seen, but it can't be harder than Cap learning to work with Tony and Thor (the latter of whom, incidentally, prompted Cap to utter my absolute favorite line in the whole film: "There's only one God, Ma'am, and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that").
For all the appropriateness of Black Widow appearing in Winter Solider, it does seem a shame that it probably means she won't be getting her own movie. Both she and Hawkeye, in fact, managed the jump from "secondary character" to "ensemble lead" quite well, especially considering the latter's post-production introduction into Thor. Spending half the film mind-controlled was perhaps a bit of a heavy-handed way to generate audience sympathy for a relative unknown, but revealing and drawing on a shared past with Natasha made his integration surprisingly easy. And of course the Widow herself had a great second appearance, being an effective Avenger even with a slightly out-of-genre skillset.
Finally, Agent Coulson. From the moment that Joss Whedon was revealed as the film's director, speculation ran rampant that Phil "First Name Is Agent" Coulson wouldn't make it through the film. It was such an obvious ploy that when it actually happened, I was actually a little surprised. That didn't make it any less meaningful, of course, either to the audience or the other characters - it helped that Phil had some great character-building scenes before getting killed, especially the ones opposite Captain America.
Happily, in true comic-book fashion it appears that the Son of Coul has cheated death (exact method unknown, though I lean towards the "Nick Fury exaggerated the extent of his injuries to give the team something to Avenge" theory) and will be taking the lead in a Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D:
Not quite the SHIELD movie I was hoping for, but it has promise. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the apparently anti-SHIELD organization The Rising Tide. Other details are sketchy at the moment but I'm definitely willing to give this show a try.
In a way, The Avengers was really a transition point not only in the development of the MCU, but the superhero-film industry generally. The effects of showing that such an elaborate project could not only work, but work well, remain to be seen - but in the meanwhile, bring on Phase II!
EDIT: Typically, just a few hours after I posted this another, much longer promo for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D went up. My interest is not reduced:
Being a former gun-shop owner and CCL instructor, the author of the Monster Hunter International series knows what he's talking about when it comes to the laws and the realities surrounding firearm ownership here in the U.S. Luckily for us, he hasn't lost his teaching skills by switching to writing best-selling novels, as he demonstrated a few nights ago:
That "best, most definitive and thorough article" is found on Larry's blog, under the title "An opinion on gun control", and is well worth your time if you're interested in hearing more about the topics touched on in the TV segment.
Back in April, I mentioned that I would be seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when it came out, no matter how it turned out. Well, the film has been out for a few weeks now, and I've gotten the chance to see it and form my opinion as to whether it was worth the effort.
About a month ago, news broke that the latest novel in the Dresden Files series, Cold Days, will be released on November 27th. Also revealed were the cover design and descriptive blurb:
HARRY DRESDEN LIVES!!!
After being murdered by a mystery assailant, navigating his way through the realm between life and death, and being brought back to the mortal world, Harry realizes that maybe death wasn’t all that bad. Because he is no longer Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard.
He is now Harry Dresden, Winter Knight to Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. After Harry had no choice but to swear his fealty, Mab wasn’t about to let something as petty as death steal away the prize she had sought for so long. And now, her word is his command, no matter what she wants him to do, no matter where she wants him to go, and no matter who she wants him to kill.
Guess which Mab wants first?
Of course, it won’t be an ordinary, everyday assassination. Mab wants her newest minion to pull off the impossible: kill an immortal. No problem there, right? And to make matters worse, there exists a growing threat to an unfathomable source of magic that could land Harry in the sort of trouble that will make death look like a holiday.
Beset by enemies new and old, Harry must gather his friends and allies, prevent the annihilation of countless innocents, and find a way out of his eternal subservience before his newfound powers claim the only thing he has left to call his own . . .
His soul.
Well, that sounds cool1. Lots of questions are raised by this, such as who the immortal Harry's supposed to kill is, and whether they're someone, or even a type of someone, we've met before. And it's very interesting that the blurb is already talking about Harry getting out of being the Winter Knight - I would have expected that arc to stick around for another few books, or maybe even until the end of the series.
That cover art is pretty interesting, too - now, in the past the cover art has never tracked too closely to the plot of the novel (it's never been inaccurate, save for that hat, mind you, but trying to divine plot details from the art has usually2 proven futile), but for this one we have a fairly major shift in that Harry's carrying a rifle instead of his staff. So that could indicate that Harry's going to be switching up and/or expanding his tactical repertoire, especially if this immortal person is someone he can't get out of killing.
Anyway, I'm quite excited about this news - hopefully the preview chapters will be up sooner rather than later (rumor is the first to are in the paperback of Ghost Story - I'll have to see if I can scrounge one of those up).
In the meantime, I've been thinking for a while of giving the whole series a re-read, and this seems like the proverbial opportune moment. Hopefully it'll also make for some good blogging!
"The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." - J. R. R. Tolkien, letter1 to Milton Waldman circa 1951.
Via Propnomicon comes news of an absolutely stunning Tolkien-related art project out of Germany. Benjamin Harff, as student at the Rhein-Sieg-Akademie for Realistic Visual Arts and Design, created for a class final one of the most beautiful copies of The Silmarillion I've ever seen:
In this interview, Harff gives some details about the creation process - it took him about a year to complete, first doing all the calligraphy by hand, then digitally combining it with the full Silmarillion text and creating the leather cover (which was professionally hand-bound) of what he calls the "Edel-Silmarallion". I hope Harff's professor was as impressed as I am!
About a year ago, I came across some references to a comic book hero called Atomic Robo. Although mostly appearing in print, several adventures are available for viewing online. One in particular, as soon as I began reading it, signaled to me that this was a story, and a character, I was really going to like.
Something I've noticed over the past several months in my reading and film-watching habits recently has been a sharp increase in stories starring Sherlock Holmes. While I've long been a fan of the Greatest Detective, these things tend to come in waves, and right now the Holmes-wave is cresting.
Most obviously, the arrival of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in theaters last December was an occasion of some welcome. I see that the first Guy Ritchie-directed Holmes adaptation came out during my own hiatus, and thus went uncommented on. I'll just take this opportunity to say that I found it an excellent movie, one that hewed close to the spirit of Doyle's stories, if not being perfectly accurate in every detail.
And I swear the tagline is an amusing coincidence.
The sequel is the pretty much the same, only more so. I do have a few quibbles with it - the liberties taken with the storyline were somewhat more noticeable, given that the film was adapting an existing Holmes story rather than making one out of whole cloth. I was also rather irritated at the fate of Irene Adler in the film, though I take some comfort from the fact that we never saw the body. So to speak.
Holmes and Watson, though, were in top form. Especially gratifying was the expanded use of Holmes' "plot-out-the-fight-in-slow-motion-in-advance" brawling technique, even considering the time that Holmes' meticulous sequence was derailed by a third party throwing a knife. And of course, his final encounter with Moriarty took this form as well, with amazing results. And let's not forget Watson - I especially appreciated his use of deductive reasoning concerning Mycroft's appearance at his "bachelor party", as well as his penultimate confrontation with Colonel Moran.
Finally, I thought Jared Harris' portrayal of Professor Moriarty to be pretty good, with just the right amount of civility papering over seething menace. His plot was refreshingly prosaic, though it reminded me quite a bit - OK, it was pretty much identical - to the Fantom's plot in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And we all know who he turned out to be:
For this topic, while there was for obvious reasons a real temptation to discuss that famous Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, I ultimately decided to go with something a bit more well-known, namely the Odyssey of Homer.
Now, the Odyssey is a classic in every since of the word - many of most iconic images of Greek mythology, such as the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe - even the Trojan Horse has its chronologically earliest mention here, rather than in the Iliad (in which it is not mentioned at all).
More tied to Odysseus himself, but no less fun to read about are instances such as the trip to the Underworld, and his stratagems against Penelope's suitors. Most of these episodes have been told, and retold, and are as familiar as they are fun to revisit.
But upon a deeper look, there's a bit more to The Odyssey than a fantastical Classical Grecian picaresque. The various episodes appear quite out of order, and when you sort through the digressions and flashbacks and shifts in viewpoint, a curious pattern emerges - all those famous incidents with incredible creatures appear in stories told by Odysseus (mostly to the Phaeacians), while the "real-time" sections deal with almost entirely mundane events, such as the intrigues aimed at dislodging The Suitors. There is an unspoken but definite possibility that Ulysses (renowned for his sneakyness) might not be an entirely reliable narrator about his adventures with giants and witches.
What's more, Odysseus' more fantastic adventures are neatly framed by the two huge storms, one at the beginning of his adventures (right before the Lotus Eaters) and the other at the end (as he makes his escape from Calypso's Island). This suggests that (assuming Odysseus is not just telling tall tales) the fantastic elements exist at a remove from the "real" world.
The potential for varied interpretations like these are no doubt just as important to the survival of The Odyssey as the ubiquity of the various incidents. However, even the deepest stories also need to be fun to tell and retell, and the genius of The Odyssey is that it manages to provide both.
So, just in case there's anyone left on the Internet who hasn't heard the news, we have now seen a teaser trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:
I have to say, I'm pretty impressed, and my excitement for the movie has been upped by several levels.
A couple of weeks ago it came to my attention that the Egotist's Club blog - from whom, readers may recall, I borrowed the 30 Days Book Challenge - have started a new round of structured literary posting. While I'm far too behind on that to even consider participating, interested parties should go read all their Book Meme 2012 posts.
And speaking of the Book Challenge, I should probably be getting back to that:
Post 9 - A Book You Thought You Wouldn't Like But Ended Up Loving
One of the things I appreciated about my college education was the encouragement to read things that were out of my comfort zone, making me and the other students more well-rounded, better educated individuals, at least in theory.
Which isn't to say that "loving" isn't too strong a word for my feelings about, say, Aristophanes' comedic play The Frogs, but I still found it much more enjoyable than one would expect of a work over twenty-four centuries old.
Ironically enough, one of the things that I enjoyed about it was how modern it seemed at times. The first half of the book, particularly, is absolutely rife with the sort of metafictional commentary that one would expect to find in a more modern piece - the first line, even, is one of the characters offering to present the audience (this was a play, remember) with "one of the old gags".
Not all of the play was this sort of modern-seeming meta-referencing, however - several amusing parts, such as a sequence where Dionysus and his slave Xanthias keeping switching around their single Heracles costume (depending on whether or not it was advantageous to be mistaken for Heracles), have the air of something that made slightly more sense, or at least had better resonance, in its original context*. On the other and, much of the second act devolves into a argument among Dionysus and various Greek literary figures, which I found to be highly technical and not interesting in the least.
But, if only for the first part where Dionysus and Xanthias are making their farcical journey to the Underworld, I am glad that I was compelled to read The Frogs. It's always a good idea to break away from "the usual" once in a while, and believe me - not much about The Frogs is "usual".
*On the other hand, I freely admit that "slapstick comedy" isn't my preferred genre, and it's quite possible that the quick-change clothes-swapping trope is alive and well in contemporary comedy and just escaped my notice.
A few days ago, the news broke that Earl Scruggs had died. Now, as important a figure to Bluegrass music as he was, I can't say I was a huge fan - though what music of his I have listened to, I've enjoyed.
In fact, one of the first CDs I ever purchased was one of his, to be precise his 2001 album Earl Scruggs and Friends. Though it didn't inspire me to seek out more Scruggs specifically, I do think it helped shaped my taste for country music in general. One track notable in this regard is his cover of "Ring of Fire" with Billy Bob Thornton, which I actually prefer to Johnny Cash's version. Sorry, Johnny, but compared to Earl's your version sounds way too much like a Mariachi band.
But the most important, and certainly the most well-known, track from that album was a new version of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". In my opinion Scruggs and company earned the Grammy this recording won them, and from the look of the video they had a blast laying it down:
Even though it's "just" the musicians in the studio, there's something about this video - like all good music videos - that makes it a joy to watch as well as listen to. Not just for the celebrity-spotting - yes, that's Steve Martin playing a banjo, and Wikipedia informs me that the gleeful maniac on the piano is Paul Shaffer - but the way each player gets some time as the primary focus, with said focus eventually returning to Scruggs himself is artfully done. And, as I said, the sheer joy evident in the various performances* is somewhat infectious - it's hard to keep from smiling while even listening to this piece.
And that, perhaps, is the best legacy any performer can have. Even though I have only a dim understanding of Earl Scruggs' legacy, I'm still grateful for the music he's left us with - and perhaps in the future I'll be inclined to listen to more of it.
*Well, except for the hirsute fellow on the keyboard - whenever the camera is on him he stays pretty Zen.
I am, in fact, posting this installment a bit out of order, for the purpose of acknowledging the just-passed hundred-and-twentieth (Twelvetieth?) birthday of said favorite writer - J. R. R. Tolkien.
There are many reasons that I consider Tolkien to be my favorite writer - I've been reading his books for almost my entire life, and it's easy to see how they've impacted my tastes over the years. More broadly, his influence on fiction has been incalculable - not only in the genre that he practically invented, but in pretty much any work that has an invented culture or people group, if there's any thought put into them at all they probably owe something to Middle-Earth.
In addition to his being incredibly creative, I've also always admired the craftsmanship with which Tolkien did his writing. The vast amounts of unfinished and draft material published since his death - and how many authors are there whose notes and drafts are viable candidates for publication, hmm? - especially underscore this, since it gives a better sense of both the breadth and the depth of Tolkien's creation.
Indeed, it's the latter of those two qualities that I really admire, the way in which he applied his vast knowledge of philology, mythology, and pre-modern literature into building a fictional world that feels almost as real as the one outside the front door. And, as if that wasn't enough, Tolkien was something of a perfectionist, constantly revising his work to make everything fit better, to the point where it's a wonder we have anything of his to read at all.
Fortunately, we do have those works, and it's no exaggeration to say that without them the world would be a far grimmer place. So, happy (belated) birthday, Professor, and thank you for all those years of pleasure and inspiration.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 3 January 1892 - 2 September 1973
I bet you thought I had forgotten about these, didn't you?
Post 8 – Most Overrated book
When I first encounter Marcus Heitz's fantasy novel The Dwarves, I was both somewhat surprised and rather excited. Now, as much as I like Tolkien, I've never been as fond of those works that took their major inspiration from him. Though there are no doubt many reasons for this, the relative sidelining of Dwarves in Tolkien's works (aside from The Hobbit) has always annoyed me, and so far as I am aware this has been more or less the standard ever since.
Therefore, when I first heard that there was a Dwarf-centric fantasy story floating around*, I was quite excited, and eager to get my hands on a copy. One might say that I pre-rated the book quite highly - however, this proved to be a mistake, as once I actually read it, I discovered that The Dwarves wasn't quite was I was expecting.
Now, there were quite a few interesting bits in the book, especially surrounding the Dwarvish culture described therein. The problem, at least to my mind, is that the author chose to make Tungdil, the hero of his story, an orphaned Dwarf raised among humans with no knowledge of his own culture.
I can see the appeal from a storytelling perspective, with the audience witnessing Dwarven political maneuvering, say, or finding out that each of the dwarven clans have an associated specialty among the traditional dwarven arts** at the same time the viewpoint character does. Furthermore, just typing out the last sentence of that last paragraph made me realize how much Tungdil's back-story resembles Worf's, although it goes a somewhat different direction.
Not a Dwarf, despite indications to the contrary.
Despite these perfectly understandable reasons, I was expecting - perhaps hoping for - something with a bit more of an "insider" view. As it stands, the book was much less unlike most post-Tolkien high fantasy than I expected, hence my initial over-rating. In retrospect, I liked quite a bit about it, especially the Dwarf-centric parts that met my expectations - but, for every steampunk pneumatic intra-continental subway system, there seemed to be an irritating non-Dwarf sidekick (such as the Human actor Rodario, who for some inscrutable reason reminded me strongly of Gilderoy Lockhart, albeit more heroic).
Still, even all this hasn't managed to completely sour me on the series - and there are three more to read. I'm sure I'll get to them someday - just not as quickly as I might've otherwise.
*Admittedly, there may be others I haven't heard of - but then, I've never heard of them, have I? **These consist of anything that involves making things out of rocks.
With a crew of drunken pilots, we're the only airship pirates!
We're full of hot air and we're starting to rise
We're the terror of the skies, but a danger to ourselves!
Over the last decade or so, untold amounts of digital ink have been spilt trying to define the term "Steampunk". Part of the problem is that steampunk is more of a stylistic genre than anything else, and as such can be applied to film, or literature, or prop-making, or music, or pretty much any other form of art.
Now, while I've been interested in the genre since I first heard of its existence* that last category, steampunk-as-music-genre, didn't really appeal. Back in 2008, however, I came across a reference to a little ditty called "Airship Pirates", by a group called Abney Park. An intriguing title, to say the least. Once I had tracked down and listened to the song, well, I really liked what I heard:
Unfortunately,none of the other songs on their "Lost Horizons" album really grabbed me in quite the same way - not even the incongruously upbeat (not to mention plot-relevant) "Post-Apocalypse Punk". So, I bought a copy of "Airship Pirates" as a single, and went on my merry way.
A couple of years later, I heard a rumor that "The Wrath of Fate", a song from the band's new album, was something of a sequel to "Airship Pirates". Now, I'm a big fan of gratuitous continuity, so I decided to give it a shot.
Now, that's more like it. As I poked around, I discovered that the new album - called The End Of Days - takes "gratuitous continuity" to a level possibly unheard of in the music industry.
It seems that, since Abney Park decided to brand itself as a "steampunk band", they've been using their songs to create a fictional background for themselves; a complex story involving time travel, accidental apocalypses ("plot-relevant", remember?), and of course Airship Piracy. In recent months, they've even branched out into a role-playing game and upcoming novel further exploring the setting.
But even without this lovingly crafted backstory, many of the songs from The End of Days (as well as their previous album, Æther Shanties) are quite enjoyable themselves. I would especially point out the aforementioned "The Wrath of Fate", "To the Apocalypse In Daddy's Sidecar", and "Neobedouin", from the former; and "Building Steam" and "The Clockyard" from the latter, as being well worth a listen.
With these last few albums, Abney Park has easily made itself one of the most unique-sounding bands I've ever heard. Even if they have written a philosophically questionable lyric or two (I'm still trying to work out whether the references to Christianity in "I've Been Wrong Before" are complimentary or not), I will be quite interested in whatever they end up doing next.
They're certainly better musicians than they are pirates, at least . . .
*The date of which, for the historically minded, I can only say (though with some certainly) was between 4 November 2004 and 23 February 2007.
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