Believe in yourself (click to embiggen)I made a disparaging remark about myself the other day, and my friend, Jeri Lynn declared, “Stop making fun of my friend Gene!” Which turned into a brief discussion of the differences between the way we treat other people, the things we will put up with other people saying about our friends and loved ones, and the ways we treat ourselves.
It also made me think of a conversation I had a week or so earlier where one of my friends made a comment about people who never seem to like anything. It’s a phenomenon I see all the time: someone claims to be a Doctor Who fan, let’s say, but they never, ever seem to have anything good to say about any episode of the show we discuss. Never. It makes one wonder why they keep watching, right?
I know I criticize all sorts of things. Particularly real world things, such as the current spate of laws trying to ban trans people from public bathrooms. And I can go on a bit of a rant about the poor storytelling choices that certain studios seem to be making because they completely misunderstand why some of their rivals are making money hand-over-fist with a similar type of movie.
It’s easy, sometimes, to rant about things that aren’t working or to raise awareness on things that are causing problems for people we care about. In the course of all that advocacy against various injustices and heartaches, it can be hard to remember that there’s a lot of good in our lives. And sometimes that good is entangled in the bad.
This is the whole reason I set myself a goal a while back about decreasing my outrage. And then gave myself the specific task of setting myself a minimum number of posts each month that will just be about things I like. Most months I made that goal. I missed it last month. I will place some of the blame on Camp NaNoWriMo and some of the blame on the unexpected death in the family (and the fallout therefrom) and let it go. Just as it isn’t good to rant about bad things all the time, it isn’t good to berate myself for missing an arbitrary goal every now and then.
There are a lot of really cool people in my life. I’ve had the joy of reading and watching a lot of good storytelling during the last year or so. I’m looking forward to quite a bit more. This Friday we’re going to see the new Captain America movie with some friends. The week after that we’re attending EverfreeNW, where I expect to see a lot of wonderful and happy people enthusing about a kids’ cartoon series. The same weekend I’m attending a musical (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) with a couple of friends, and watching a very talented and awesome teen-ager of my acquaintance playing one of the roles. Next month we’re attending the Locus Awards weekend (my first time) which I expect will be fun (it includes a banquet where one of my favorite authors will be MC-ing, a bunch of books and stories will receive awards, and there’s an Aloha Shirt competition! What could be sillier and cooler than that?).
Flowers are blooming all over my neighborhood. People are writing interesting stories, drawing cute and wonderful art—and we get to read and look at a bunch of it!
I’ve been trying to remind myself, whenever I look at a web comic, or a posted story, or even just a cute observation on someone’s tumblr, to click the “Like” or “♡” (heart) or “✩” (star) or whatever option the particular web service gives us for telling the person who posted it that we appreciated it. Because posting things takes time and effort. And if it made us chuckle, or nod in agreement, or smile, or just feel a little less worried about things even for a moment, we should let the person know.
Because it isn’t easy for some people to believe in themselves. And they don’t always have a friend sitting nearby to come to their defense when they feel discouraged.
It’s time for another in my series of posts recommending web comics!
This one is not a regular comic. It is instead three pages out of a Superman comic book. A lot of people have been sharing it because of how grim and dark and non-hero-like the last two official superman movies have been, as an example of what many fans love about the character, which is being completely lost in the new movies: A well written Superman. It really is good.
Surviving the World: A Photocomic Education by Dante Shepherd is another example of a comic that I don’t bookmark because at least once a week someone I know shares an example of this in my social media. I click on it, then read backward until I hit a comic I’ve seen before. A daily webcomic which has been going for about eight years, “Surviving the World” is actually authored by professor Lucas Landherr under the pseudonym Dante Shepherd, which he initial used so to avoid getting in trouble when he was a grad student. There’s a section of the comic’s About page where Landherr tries to list the fake biographical details he included during his years in grad school, and then his time working for an institution with a strict confidentiality clause. Most of the comics consist of Landheer, dressed in a lab coat and baseball cap, standing next to a chalkboard on which the day’s joke, comical observation, what-have-you is written. When he and/or his family go on a trip, the day’s strip is sometimes composed in another setting with a series of smaller chalkboards.
Some of the comics I’ve previously recommended:
“Mr. Cow,” by Chuck Melville tells the tale of a clueless cow with Walter Cronkite dreams. If the twice-weekly gags about a barnyard of a newsroom aren’t enough excitement for you the same artist also writes and draws (and colors!) some awesome fantasy series: Champions of Katara and Felicia, Sorceress of Katara. If you like Mr. Cow, Felicia, or Flagstaff (the hero of Champions of Katara) you can support the artist by going to his Patreon Page. Also, can I interest you in a Mr. Cow Mug?
“Deer Me,” by Sheryl Schopfer tells the tales from the lives of three friends (and former roommates) who couldn’t be more dissimilar while being surprisingly compatible. If you enjoy Deer Me, you can support the artist by going to her Patreon Page!
Scurry by Mac Smith is the story of a colony of mice trying to survive a long, strange winter in a world where humans have mysteriously vanished, and food is becoming ever more scarce.
And I love this impish girl thief with a tail and her reluctant undead sorcerer/bodyguard: “Unsounded,” by Ashley Cope.
Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu is the story of Eric “Bitty” Biddle, a former junior figure skating champion from a southern state who is attending fictitious Samwell College in Massachusetts, where he plays on the men’s hockey team. Bitty is the smallest guy on the team, and in the early comics is dealing with a phobia of being body-checked in the games. He’s an enthusiastic baker, and a die hard Beyoncé fan.
The Young Protectors by Alex Wolfson begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
Caterwall by Spain Fischer is the story of Pax (the orphaned son of a knight who was the hero of the kingdom) and his best friend Gavin (the descendant of a line of seers). Pax is a young man who has a reputation for pulling pranks and telling lies, who gets exiled from the kingdom.
The Junior Science Power Hour by Abby Howard. is frequently autobiographical take on the artist’s journey to creating the crazy strip about science, science nerds, why girls are just as good at being science nerds as boys, and so much more. It will definitely appeal to dinosaur nerds, anyone who has ever been enthusiastic about any science topic, and especially to people who has ever felt like a square peg being forced into round holes by society.
If you want to read a nice, long graphic-novel style story which recently published its conclusion, check-out the not quite accurately named, The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver. I say inaccurate because I found their story quite epic (not to mention engaging, moving, surprising, fulfilling… I could go on). Some sections of the tale are Not Safe For Work, as they say, though she marks them clearly. The complete graphic novels are available for sale in both ebook and paper versions, by the way.
Oglaf, by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne is a Not Safe For Work web comic about… well, it’s sort a generic “medieval” high fantasy universe, but with adult themes, often sexual.
I had taken this test before, but recently found a link to it and took it again:
I was struck by how dated some of the questions were, then I found the Nerd Test 2.0 on the same site and took it, and it was a bit better:
But still terribly dated. For instance, the second test mentions owning computers with more than a gig of memory. Really? Smart phones have that much memory, now. Therefore, all sorts of non-nerds own at least one computing-type device that falls into that category. I get that when the test was written, that threshold was a big deal, but what sort of nerd doesn’t think about how quickly technology becomes obsolete, and therefore would try to design a test so that it could still be relevant in a year or three?
In the sketch, four Yorkshiremen tell ever more ludicrous tales of how poor and disadvantaged they were as children, then another insists that was luxury compared to theirs… (click to embiggen)The tests also mention owning computers with less than 512K of memory, which would imply that one owned a computer some years ago when home computers were less ubiquitous. But my first thought when reading the question was, “512K? Luxury!” (And yes, I am alluding to the old Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch)
Seriously, the first computer I ever owned only had 1K of memory… and no persistent storage.
But I have nerdy/geek friends who weren’t even alive in 1983 when the Timex Sinclair was a thing, so using it (or even the 512K range) as a means to measure one’s nerdiness smacks more of ageism than actual nerdiness. It’s true that I have sometimes bragged about the fact that the only programming class I ever took involved writing our programs with punch cards. Hey! Fortran was cutting edge at one time!
But most of my point about that is: my whole adult life I have made a living in the computer industry and at different times my job has included coding or scripting (which aren’t the same thing, but they both involve algorithmic thinking), but I’ve done it all without taking formal classes in any of the languages that I have ever been required to use on the job. I’m not really bragging about how early I got into computers, because that is simply a product of how old I am. Since I had no control over when I would be born, that’s out of my control. I usually bring it up to say that the important thing about any skill is your ability to learn new stuff as you go and don’t be afraid to try something just because you’ve never done it before.
While things like a Nerd Test can be fun, there’s an awful lot of gatekeeping implied in many (most) of the questions (and we’ve had more than enough gatekeeping going on around here!). That doesn’t even get into the whole conflation of nerd and geek and dork!
I’m a nerd. I get really enthusiastic and pedantic about the things I love. And a lot of those things have to do with math, science, technology, science fiction, and fantasy. But you can be nerdy about words, or knitting, or art supplies, or bow hunting, or vintage cars, or—well, anything! One of my friends has been nerding out the last year or so on cocktail making, for instance. I have friends who nerd-out about cellos. It’s all good, and we don’t need to keep score.
I’m attending NorWesCon this weekend. We skipped the last couple of years, and I’ve really missed it. I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time hanging out with many different kinds of nerds, and being a big ol’ nerd myself.
Puppies in tin foil hats (Click to embiggen)So the Sad Puppies have officially released their recommendation list. Yes, I said list, not slate. Last year’s Sad/Rabid slates were coordinated and encouraged bloc-voting. This year different people are in charge of the Sad Puppy campaign, and they gathered a big list after taking recommendations for months. In all of the fiction categories, at least, there are more than five recommendations, so you can’t slate vote it.
A few other people have written about this year’s list. In sad puppies 4: the… better behaving?, Dara Korra’ti says a lot of what I was thinking when I saw the list. I’m glad that the Sad Puppies have taken a more transparent approach. I’m glad that the list isn’t dominated by stories published in only one very small publication house owned by one of the organizers. I’m really glad that three of the recommendations in a single category are not by the same author. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that the people running it this year are sincerely trying to do no more than get more of the works they like on the ballot, rather than push a political agenda. I’ve never objected to recommendation lists no matter who makes those recommendations. As Dara explains:
What I object to is their conspiracy-theory paranoia, their Not Real Fan bullshittery, their political propaganda, their insistence that people voting for things other than their list has nothing to do with actual enjoyment or quality but a cartoonish parody of a political standard they made up, and – most of all – their ballot-stuffing last year. But I do not object to them making recommendations lists.
I am also still a firm believer that at this year’s World Science Fiction Society business meeting we must ratify E Pluribus Hugo so that the particular hack that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies exploited last year won’t easily happen again. And I remain slightly worried that the only reason the current leaders are being reasonable this time (and the more noxious folks are being quieter) is because they hope the rules change won’t be adopted, so they can do what they did last year again, since any rules change has to be approved in two consecutive annual meetings to take effect. I really hope that isn’t what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, since last year they were crowing that there was no way they could lose because they had taken over a couple of whole categories, then threw a hissy fit when it was pointed out that Hugo voters could No Award those categories, and then they tried to claim that’s what they wanted all along, et cetera, I have no confidence that this isn’t just a tactic to lull some voters into a sense of false security.
The fact that a small, self-entitled clique that sought to wrestle control of the award away from fandom at large was able to game the ballot formation so effectively last year came down to how low participation in the nominations historically has been. The fact that this same clique was given a thorough drubbing by fandom at large in the actual awards came down to how high participation was.
It may have been a mistake to post a recommended reading list with probably over a million words of content two weeks before nominations close. Unless it was a clever trick to say “aha! Sad Puppies was about the discussion, not the final list!” in which case, well played. That means that those who came over from places like File770 to leave comments and votes are now Sad Puppies.
…if your followers heap abuse on everybody who dares to disagree with you, is it any surprise that a lot of people want nothing to do with you?
All that said, I am still happy about a few of the silver linings of last year’s Affair of the Melancholy Canines: lots of fans and small press writers who never participated in the Hugo voting before have joined; I met several cool people (particularly several very interesting queer and feminist writers) because of the discussions surrounding the affair; and the nominees for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form finally had some diversity.
I don’t think enough people give the Puppies credit for that last bit. In the previous nine years, at least two of the options in this category each time were episodes of Doctor Who (or a related show). The last few years the category has been three or four Doctor Who eps and a Game of Thrones episode, and maybe one other show. But last year, five different television series were represented. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m one of the biggest Doctor Who fans out there, but there are and have been other shows that deserved a nod. Last year the ballot consisted of five different shows, one episode each. Which I think was great.
I have been reluctant to post my list of Hugo recommendations because, as Cisrova observes, with only a few weeks left until the deadline, there isn’t much time for people to actually read all the things I might recommend, and I think you ought only to recommend things you’ve actually read/watched/listened to et cetera. I’ve spent most of my spare time the last two months reading books I bought that were published last year, and reading short stories in on-line zines in order to have more things to nominate. But I figure there is nothing wrong with sharing recommendations, as long as one is clear that it is just a recommendation for things I think you ought to read or check out:
Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
(I decided in the spirit of choices, to limit myself to one episode for each series I nominated)
Ash vs Evil Dead: El Jefe
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion
Orphan Black: Certain Agony of the Battlefield
The Expanse: The Big Empty
Person of Interest: If. Then. Else.
Novel
The Discworld Series, by Terry Pratchett
The Shepherd’s Crown, by Terry Pratchett (in case the series as a whole doesn’t make it)
The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear
Novella
(I’m still working on this… lots of stories I’ve read and liked are shorter than novella length)
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
The Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
Novelette
“The New Mother,” by Eugene Fischer
Short Story
“How My Father Became a God” by Dilman Dila
“Ashfall,” by Edd Vick and Manny Frisberg
“In Libris,” by Elizabeth Bear
“The Ways of Walls and Words,” by Sabrina Vourvoulias
Fancast
Cabbages & Kings
Galactic Suburbia
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Flame On!
Fan Writer
Vajra Chandrasekera
Leslie Light
Mark Oshiro
Cora Buhlert
Alexandra Erin
Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Ant-Man
The Rocky Horror Show Live
Related Work
Geek Knits, by Toni Carr
Bone Walker, by Crime and the Forces of Evil
Next, I need to go through all the online zines I read and figure out which editors to nominate in short form, and figure out what fan sites (in addition to File 770) that I read regularly count as fanzines.
I’m nominating only things I’ve read/watched/listened to myself. And I plan, just as I did last year, to read everything that makes it to the ballot, no matter who wrote it or who included it on a slate or list. If I don’t like the piece, it goes below No Award; if I like it, it’ll rank above No Award—again regardless of who wrote it or recommended it.
Another in my series of posts recommending web comics. I haven’t posted one of these in several months, which makes me feel more than a little guilty. Anyway, here are a couple of new strips for your enjoyment:
Scurry by Mac Smith is the story of a colony of mice trying to survive a long, strange winter in a world where humans have mysteriously vanished, and food is becoming ever more scarce. The artwork is really good, with an interesting cast of characters and a very intriguing premise. You assume that something apocalyptic has happened to the humans, but you aren’t sure what it is. Whatever has happened, it clearly has set up an apocalypse for the mouse colony. Which made me think of the observation Terry Pratchett made in more than one book: every day someone’s world ends. Scurry is a very good comic. And I’m so glad I found it relatively early in the story. I’m hanging on the edge of my seat, waiting for the next installment! Also, thanks so much to my friend, Atara, for recommending it!
Check, Please! by Ngozi Ukazu. I discovered this comic recently when several blogs I follow on tumblr featured what looked like fan art from a show or comic that I’d never heard of. And what really got me were some of the excited comments of these fans. But they weren’t mentioning the name of whatever this story was, just some for the character names, so I had to google a bit until I finally found out that Check, Please is the story of Eric “Bitty” Biddle, a former junior figure skating champion from a southern state who is attending fictitious Samwell College in Massachuseets, where he plays on the men’s hockey team. Bitty is the smallest guy on the team, and in the early comics is dealing with a phobia of being body-checked in the games (before college he played in a co-ed league where checking was not allowed). He’s an enthusiastic baker, and a die hard Beyoncé fan. The comic to date covers his Freshmen and Sophomore years, featuring an endearing cast of characters, and mostly low-key drama. There is an associated twitter account (though it is currently locked as private because it contains spoilers for the coming episodes). I was immediately hooked and zoomed through the whole series of comics in a single evening. I can’t wait to find out what happens next!
Some of the comics I’ve previously recommended:
“Mr. Cow,” by Chuck Melville tells the tale of a clueless cow with Walter Cronkite dreams. If the twice-weekly gags about a barnyard of a newsroom aren’t enough excitement for you the same artist also writes and draws (and colors!) some awesome fantasy series: Champions of Katara and Felicia, Sorceress of Katara. If you like Mr. Cow, Felicia, or Flagstaff (the hero of Champions of Katara) you can support the artist by going to his Patreon Page. Also, can I interest you in a Mr. Cow Mug?
“Deer Me,” by Sheryl Schopfer tells the tales from the lives of three friends (and former roommates) who couldn’t be more dissimilar while being surprisingly compatible. If you enjoy Deer Me, you can support the artist by going to her Patreon Page!
And I love this impish girl thief with a tail and her reluctant undead sorcerer/bodyguard: “Unsounded,” by Ashley Cope.
The Young Protectors by Alex Wolfson begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
If you want to read a nice, long graphic-novel style story which recently published its conclusion, check-out the not quite accurately named, The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver. I say inaccurate because I found their story quite epic (not to mention engaging, moving, surprising, fulfilling… I could go on). Some sections of the tale are Not Safe For Work, as they say, though she marks them clearly. The complete graphic novels are available for sale in both ebook and paper versions, by the way.
Cover of Arthur C. Clarke’s -The City and the Stars- (Click to embiggen)I think I was 16 when I found a battered paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars in a used bookstore. This was not my first Clarke novel. That had been 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had found in a library a few years before. I wouldn’t see the movie until many years later. I had also read many of Clarke’s short stories, so I was familiar with his work and his reputation as one of the best.
I had never heard of this particular novel, but the description on the back cover was intriguing, and since he had such a reputation, I felt almost obligated to read more of his work.
The story is set a billion years in the future, in the city of Diaspar, which is the last home of mankind. Humans are effectively immortal. Individuals are “born” nearly full grown in essentially replicators, and they live in the perfect unchanging city creating art and exploring philosophy or literature or poetry for hundreds or even thousands of years, until they decide to rest, at which point their memories are transferred back to the central memory banks and their bodies un-replicated. Until some random interval later when the computer will determine they need to be reborn again.
Cover of the first paperback edition of The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton. (Click to embiggen)The first time I remember hearing about The Andromeda Strain was while reading a movie theatre calendar. We were living in a small town in Utah which didn’t have a movie theatre of its own, but we were about an hour drive away from the small Colorado town where I had been born and my grandparents still lived. And often when we visited I would look at the monthly theatre calendar which was distributed free with the local weekly paper. Sometimes I would attempt to talk my parents into letting me come back on a particular weekend to go to the movie.
I think it was the fall of 1971 (I would have been eleven) when I saw the listing, and the name and very short description had me intrigued. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to convince my parents to let me have the movie trip.
About a year later The Andromeda Strain was broadcast on network TV, probably as a movie of the week (that was a thing back then), and for whatever reason, we didn’t watch the first part of the movie. Probably it conflicted with a show my dad liked, so we watched the other show, first, then switched channels and watched the last half of the movie. So I was a bit confused, but it was still pretty exciting. The last part of the film was very tense and entertaining, even without the beginning.
The following week in school, everyone was talking about the movie. It was one of the few times that I remember kids who usually didn’t know a thing about science fiction talking about a sci fi plot.
Not long afterward, I happened across a battered paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s novel upon which the movie was based. I read it in a single sitting. One of the things that amazed me when I finished was how closely the half of the movie I saw followed the latter portion of the book. My previous experience of comparing movies to the books they were based on was that the movie often bore virtually no resemblance to the book.
The story of the Andromeda Strain is that a space probe is sent into low earth orbit and brought back down. It lands in a small, isolated town, and by the time the retrieval team arrives to pick it up, it seems that every inhabitant of the town has been killed. The retrieval team dies will communicating with their government superiors, and a Wildfire alert is activated. Wildfire is a codename for protocol government scientists have put together to respond to a biological threat from space. A team of scientists are pulled from their regular jobs and rushed to a secret underground facility. Two of the scientists go into the town in hazmat suits, find the satellite, and also find two survivors, an old man and a crying infant. The bulk of the story deals with how the scientists figure out what the infection is, and why those two very different characters are immune.
Before they have quite figured everything out, the extraterrestrial organism (which is neither a virus nor a bacterium) mutates and starts eating the plastics and rubber seals throughout the lab. This sets off an alarm and starts an automatic countdown on a nuclear self-destruct device. One of the things the scientists have determined about the organism is that it is not only immune to radiation, but will actually thrive in the explosion, and probably destroy all life on the planet. Thus we get to the tense ending where the characters are trying to stop the self-destruct and find a way to neutralize the infection.
One of the things that disappointed me about the book was that one of the most interesting characters in the movie, Dr. Ruth Leavitt, was a much less interesting man, Dr. Paul Leavitt, in the novel. I’m not sure if the character in the movie was more interesting because the actress, Kate Reid, played a very believable character, or if the character was just less interesting in the original.
I re-read The Andromeda Strain at least once more after seeing the movie all the way through, and I still found Reid’s version of the Leavitt character more interesting. And this was decades before I’d ever heard of the Bechdel Test!
The Andromeda Strain was a bestseller, and set Michael Crichton on the path of future success that would lead to, among other things, Jurassic Park. The movie was only a moderate success, which is too bad, because it was really well done. The science included was, for the most part, plausible at time. In fact, nothing in the film required any sort of advancement of technology beyond what we had available. Exactly how the life form could convert energy to matter was the only bit of dubious handwaving to speak of. It wasn’t the only time that the movie version of a science fiction story was better than the book, but I think it might have been the first time that I noticed it.
I enjoyed the show. So did my (now late) husband, Ray. We tuned in faithfully each week, chatting about various aspects of the show as we watched. I’d been such a big fan of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that of course I was interested in this show. Ray, on the other hand, barely remembered the other series (and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was a few years younger than I, or if maybe his family simply hadn’t watched it), but he was a fan of mysteries and sci fi and “spooky stuff” so was just as interested in the concept of the show before we had even seen it.
The show’s mysteries were interesting. Sometimes very creepy, sometimes sad. There was just the right amount of human and pathos in the most serious shows to keep you hooked. And then occasionally there were episodes that were primarily funny.
They avoiding the obvious “she’s always a cold-hearted skeptic”/”he’s a passionate true believer” dynamic that he seemed implied from the beginning. Mulder wasn’t a true believer. He frequently repeated the line, “I want to believe.” As we learned about the childhood disappearance of his sister, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, we understood why he needed to believe that there were things happening beyond the simple, rational explanations with which so many mysteries are dismissed. And Scully, of course, wasn’t cold-hearted, and while she remained skeptical, she wasn’t close-minded.
The show did a really good job of portraying different ways that a sense of wonder (and sometimes dread) could manifest when we are confronted with situations that don’t have an obvious, simple, and safe explanation.
I really loved the show in the early seasons. I recall especially being on the edge of my seat at the end of the season two finale, barely able to contain myself waiting to learn what the answer to the cliffhanger would be the next fall. Things started to go awry, for me, during the third season, and by the fifth or sixth I was finding myself irritated by the show more often then entertained. I might have given up if not for a friend who suggested this way of looking at it: “I’ve decided to think of it as two completely separate shows happening in parallel universes. They happen to have identically named characters played by the same actors, but they are other wise unconnected. One is the quirky, cool ‘there are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ mystery of the week show that I adore; and the other is the awful, poorly written, contradictory, batshit alien conspiracy/maybe we’re all crazy show that I hate—and I have to put up with the latter in order to keep watching the former.”
And that helped a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the conspiracy related to aliens was there from the very beginning, and I was onboard with watching them confront and explore that. The problem, from my perspective, was that unlike their monster of the week kinds of episodes, they never seemed to have a clear idea of what was actually happening with the conspiracy. Years later we might call their problem the “Lost syndrome,” because like that more recent show, the writers seemed to be throwing contradictory and confusingly cryptic clues at us without a clear idea of what the “real” explanation was.
I think that the show’s original creator did have an idea of what the explanation was, but either he allowed other writers who didn’t know to go off on misleading tangents that couldn’t be reconciled as simply red herrings, or perhaps he didn’t know how to keep the series going if he ever revealed the answer.
So it was with a bit of trepidation that I watched the first episode of the new mini series a few weeks ago. And I have to admit, that opener left me with a lot more dread than hope. Then the second episode was a bit better, like one of the typical mystery of the week shows I used to love.
And then we got to the third episode, “Scully & Mulder Meet the Were-monster” and I was in heaven. It was funny. And with a lot of Easter Eggs that weren’t annoying. Two actors who played stoned teen-agers who witnessed a mysterious event back in the very first season, returned to play the same characters, no longer teens, who are out in the woods huffing spray paint when they witness another event. There was a homage the Kolchak in the story, an incredible amount of humor, yet it was an incredibly dark commentary on real life at the same time. It was really, really good, and included everything I had loved about the best of the earliest episodes. And I was incredibly happy to see, online over the next several days, the number of review sites and sci fi/fantasy enthusiasts who had enjoyed the episode the same as I had.
At its best, the X-Files was about things in life—sometimes awful, tragic things—that don’t fit neatly into our preconceptions of how the world can be. More importantly, it is about the way we try to understand those things—how we confront mystery, tragedy, disappointment, horror, and betrayal—and how we cling to meaning and hope in spite of it. It’s about finding the human connection, finding the reasons to hope, finding the things to cherish, and never losing our curiosity.
And it’s also, sometimes, about really creepy monsters.
In the movie, The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin plays Kolchak, a reporter working in Las Vegas, dating a showgirl, and covering typical news stories. Until he began being suspicious about a series of deaths that seemed very similar, but which the police insisted were unrelated. First Kolchak was convinced that it was simply a serial killer who was draining all the blood from his victims’ bodies because he was insane and believed he was a vampire. As Kolchak finds more and more evidence of similar crimes going back decades, he begins to worry that the killer really is a vampire.
Which, of course, turns out to be the case. Kolchak witnesses a couple of attempts by the police to capture the killer. The second attempt is such an epic failure, with multiple cops killed and dozens of bullets striking the killer (played creepily by Barry Atwater) to no avail. This convinces at least one FBI agent that it is a vampire. Kolchak and his FBI buddy track down and kill the vampire.
Kolchak writes the full account of the vampire’s long career of murder and eventual destruction, proposes to his girlfriend, and prepares to move to New York City where he expects to be able to write his own ticket. Except the FBI and local police don’t want anyone to know about vampires. They kill the story (getting Kolchak’s boss fired, I believe). They substitute a more mundane tale of a serial killer with Kolchak’s byline. Then they inform him that his girlfriend has already been convinced to leave town, and tell him he’s no longer welcome in Vegas.
The story ends with Kolchak re-dictating the entire tale into his portable tape recorder while sitting alone in a sleazy motel room. He explains how all the evidence is destroyed, and that he’s exhausted his savings trying to find his fiancée, so far to no avail.
It was a sad and creepy end to a film.
The Night Stalker was a made-for-TV movie based on an unsold novel by Jeff Rice, originally titled The Kolchak Papers. Rice’s agent had more luck selling the novel idea to ABC as a movie idea than he’d had selling it to a book publisher. The movie was a surprise hit, drawing in unheard of ratings when it ran. It was so successful that the network commissioned Richard Matheson, who had adapted Rice’s book into script from, to write a sequel. A book publisher was suddenly interested in Rice’s novel, but only if they could also get a deal on the sequel. So Rice wrote a novelization of Matheson’s sequel script, and in 1973 two Kolchak books, along with the sequel TV movie, The Night Strangler were all released.
The Night Strangler came out almost exactly a year after the first movie. In it Kolchak had relocated to Seattle where he stumbled upon an immortal who was living in Underground Seattle2 who every 21 years has to kill several women in order to harvest their blood in a very specific fashion to manufacture his “elixer of life.” The sequel did well enough again that work began on a third movie. Until the network put that all aside and decided to turn Kolchak’s story into a regular weekly TV series, which debuted in September of 1974 and ran for one season.
McGavin returned to play Kolchak. In the series Kolchak, along with his editor from both movies (played by Simon Oakland), have been relocated to Chicago where they work for the Independent News Service. Each week Kolchak stumbles upon a new monster or mystery that winds up having a fantastic explanation. Unlike the original movie, Kolchak never has any credible witnesses survive to corroborate his stories, so no one ever believes.
After the two wildly successful TV movies, the network had high hopes, but the initial ratings weren’t terribly exciting. After four episodes of The Night Stalker had aired, the series went on hiatus for a bit over a month. It came back, re-titled Kolchak: the Night Stalker! with new theme music, though not any changes to the tone, setting, or cast.
Ratings continued a slow, steady decline, causing the network to pull the plug at episode 20, cutting short the original order of 26 episodes.
The series ran during my 7th grade year. We had moved by the Colorado, this time returning to the small town where I’d been born, and where one set of grandparents and one set of great-grandparents still lived. Puberty had hit the year before, and I suddenly knew exactly why I’d always felt out-of-place to the point of wondering if I was a changeling left in place of my parent’s real child by evil elves, or maybe an alien sent to study humans—I was gay. It was during this same period that I started fooling around regularly with one other gay classmate (while having a completely unrequited crush on a different classmate that as far as I know was straight). I lived in a constant state of fear of being found out, terrified of what family, friends, and the rest of the town would do if they had proof I was a fag.
I threw myself even more fervently into reading science fiction and fantasy, so of course I was a faithful viewer tuning in each week to see what Kolchak would uncover next. Kolchak was appealing in part because these incredible, usually awful, things kept happening around him, but no one ever believed him. He was in sort of a reverse closet. He wanted people to know the truth, but everyone else did everything they could to ignore, explain away, and ridicule that truth.
While I did tune in faithfully each week, I have to confess that as the series went on, each episode was a little bit less satisfying. I can’t be certain why, having not re-watched it in years, but something about seeing Kolchak not be believed week after week was much less interesting than seeing it in two movies separated by a year. Maybe it was because Kolchak was seldom heroic. He had a determination to learn the truth, yes, but clearly he would have much rather interviewed people after the fight with the monster, rather than take on the creatures himself. He was always a bit rumbled and always seemed to stumble and fumble his way into a lot of the stories and events in the series, rather than get there through dogged determination. Maybe the series just didn’t know how to walk the tightrope between mystery/horror and comedy.
Some years later Chris Carter would have more success with The X-Files, a series he admitted was inspired by Kolchak. So the week-to-week mysteries the world doesn’t want to admit exist notion could be spun into a successful show. I don’t know what about the collective consciousness of 1974 made Kolchak less appealing than the audience of the 90s would find Scully and Mulder4.
I still look back on The Night Stalker with a lot of fondness. I empathized so much with they guy who knew and believed things no one else would credit. It wasn’t just the parallels to my own queer secret, though. I was also having an ever more difficult time reconciling my love of science and history with the fundamentalist evangelical beliefs of our church and the vast majority of our neighbors. I felt as if people were constantly belittling scientific facts and scientists, blatantly ignoring evidence right in front of them and insisting on a worldview that just didn’t square up with not just my lived experience, but theirs.
Kolchak kept chasing that truth, kept examining the evidence, never letting the naysayers or conventional wisdom stop him. And that was a role model I desperately needed.
Notes:
1. I wound up completing the entirety of 5th and 6th grade, in addition to the half of 4th in that same school. This tied my previous record of Kindergarten, 1st, and part of 2nd in the Ft. Collins, Colorado school district. By contrast, 3rd grade was split between three schools, each in a different state (and if the brief sojourn in Kansas had begun a few weeks earlier than in did, 3rd grade would have been four schools in four states).
2. This movie makes the mistake of most pop culture representations of Underground Seattle do. It portrays it as if some sort of disaster buried part of the city in a single night and the survivors rebuilt on top. A dining room underground that still has dishes, silverware, and petrified food figures in the story, for instance. In actuality, Seattle decided it was tired of the routine flooding and sewer backups that happened in the part of downtown built on swamp land, and they razed a hill at the north end of town to redistribute the dirt to raise the streets in the south end. It took many months. During the transition some of the taller buildings had new doors built into the existing second or third floors at the new street level. Other buildings had additional stories built atop them. Spaces that had originally been ground floors became basements. In only a very small number of cases have any of those old spaces been kept in anything close to their original state3.
3. Many, many years ago a software company I worked for that had offices downtown rented storage space in the basement of the building next door. The basement had originally been a dance hall before the streets were raised. The solid wood dance floor was still there, and some of the fancy woodwork on the walls was still visible, but the building owners and subdivided the space into a bunch of 10 foot by 10 foot cubes with cheep plywood, and rented each out for storage. It wasn’t terribly exotic any longer. And you just walked down ordinary stairs to get to it.
4. A subject I’ll go into much more detail about next week, I think!
Dust jacker of the first edition of Bradbury’s collection, R is for rocket.I don’t remember when I first read a story by Ray Bradbury.
That’s not quite right. The sentence is true, but it doesn’t convey the full meaning. It’s equally true that I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about Ray Bradbury’s incredible stories. He isn’t the only author who falls into the category. Since my Mom read to me from her favorite two authors: Agatha Christie and Robert Heinlein, since I was a baby as part of her plan to make sure I learned to talk correctly, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Heinlein or Christie. And it’s more than slightly likely that Mom read some Bradbury in there at one point, so that might account for it…Continue reading I is for Imagination – more of why I love sf/f→
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