Decision Made (Finally!)

/ JD Byrne / 5 Comments

The more I write the more I realize that coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part. What’s hard is figuring out which ideas have legs and can become stories or books. Sometimes it takes some hard work to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

When Heroes of the Empire came out in June  it brought to a close a long period of focusing on one world and one project. Since 2018, at least, when I started the first draft of Gods of the Empire, I’d basically lived in the world of the Unari Empire, building it out and telling the stories of my characters in it. The only reason I felt able to work on the sequel to Moore Hollow in the spaces between those books was that it meant returning to a world I already knew.

At the same time, I was gathering ideas like some thieving magpie, putting them away in various Word documents for a later date. I knew from the time I collected them that some had more substance than others, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how long it would take me to figure out which ones were which.

See, the thing with trilogies, at least for me, is that they are an implicit promise to the reader – I know how this ends and I’m going to finish it in good time. If I say “here’s my new book, it’s the first part of a trilogy,” rest assured that, barring some unforeseen circumstance, I’m working on those books for the next few years.

Which means, back in June, I got really excited about the idea of diving into a new world. Part of what makes writing fantasy so fun is you get to let your imagination wander and come up with strange new places, things, and people. Writing a trilogy means that you have to put that wandering on hold and I was happy to get my walking shoes back on (so to speak).

And I had a target – I wanted to start my next book during National Novel Writing Month. I’ve done that for several of my books. NaNoWriMo provides a great way to focus on writing for a month, even if what you’re left with on December 1 is only two-thirds or even one-half of a finished manuscript. That would give me a couple of months to build the world, flesh out the characters, and then figure out what was going to happen to them.

Easy, right? If only.

I actually had to go through my idea files pretty brutally, with virtual red pen and everything, and just get rid of stuff that didn’t really strike my fancy. Some of those were mere ideas (“surely there’s a fantasy story in the Scapa Flow incident, right? What about High Noon but with wizards!”) that were never going to become a real story. Others were things that I’d hung on to so long without developing that I figured their time had passed. Ultimately, they were ideas that I just didn’t see sprouting stories and I hadn’t faced up to that fact yet.

In the end I had about three dozen ideas that could become my next project, so I decided to so what my anal retentive self always does – start dividing and conquering them. I put each idea into one of four groups – Sci-Fi, Older Fantasy, Newer Fantasy, and Non-SF/Fantasy (yes, I’ve got a couple of those). The goal was to produce a “winner” in each group and then compare those four to each other. I almost worked – I wound up with five finalists because I couldn’t decide between the top to Newer Fantasy ideas.

I worked through each idea. I took a week and spent one day thinking through all the angles I could for every one. I did a PowerPoint presentation for my wife to get her feedback on the ideas. Good ideas that I at first thought were front runners fell by the wayside either because they weren’t as deep as I’d hoped or they just weren’t singing to me.

Finally, last week, I was in Richmond for court and had some time the night before to work through the final three (don’t worry, my colleague was doing the argument the next morning). I walked around my hotel room, talking to myself, arguing the pros of a particular idea then playing devil’s advocate and tearing it apart. After a couple of hours, and a really enormous calzone, I finally made a decision.

My next project has the working title The Fall. It’s inspired by the sad tale of Franz Reichelt, a Parisian tailor who met an infamous fate:

To use an awful pun, that’s the jumping off point for this project. It’ll be set in a similar kind of world, timeline wise, but include what I think is a really nifty magical element. This is my first time building a magic system for one of my novels, so I’m both anxious and excited about the prospect. Structurally I’m leaning toward doing something like Citizen Kane, where the main character is investigating someone’s life and we see it play out in flashbacks.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to diving into this.

And, yes, it is the one my wife liked best.

Some Thoughts On My Alma Mater(s)

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It’s always nice when you see Margaret Atwood share a picture of your alma mater(s)’s most distinctive building! Oh, wait:

Yes, West Virginia University, from which I obtained my two degrees, has been in the national news recently and not for anything good (although the men’s soccer team is nationally ranked!). Faced with a tens-of-million dollar shortfall, the WVU administration has decided to cut numerous class offerings and majors. As the faculty open letter Atwood highlights puts it:

WVU’s current crisis has received significant national news coverage over the past few weeks. Faculty and staff heard vague rumors about financial problems in late 2022, but the deficit was publicly announced only in March 2023. The crisis is largely caused by financial mismanagement; the university is running a $45 million deficit after a decade of real estate boondoggles, administrative bloat, and declining state funding. Instruction costs have declined but the administration is responding to the budget deficit by proposing a mass layoff of around 170 faculty and an undeclared number of staff this fall on top of 135 layoffs over the summer. Many departments may be closed or gutted to the point of not being able to function. Academic support units are also suffering: the library was forced to reduce its operational budget by thirty percent and currently cannot purchase books. Not a single senior administrator—many making at least five to ten times what most faculty earn—is taking a pay cut.

Beyond the fact that the administrators who got WVU into this mess aren’t likely to face any repercussions (Gordon Gee, WVU president who presided over all this mess, will retire to a spot on the College of Law faculty – the academic version of a corrupt prosecutor becoming a judge, I suppose), what really bothers me about all this is WVU’s insistence that everything is actually fine.

I got an email the other day (at my work email address, for some reason), titled:

It says, a little further one:

Due respect, but no, it won’t be the same University I know and love. For one thing it will be diminished as a teaching institution. How couldn’t it? The email (and other news releases) cite the relatively low number of students majoring in, say, foreign languages, but that minimizes the issue. How many future WVU students will be denied the experience of a former colleague of mine who, via the foreign language requirement for her major, wound up studying abroad and widening her horizons in ways that still impact her today?

For another, the reputation of WVU will take a hit due to all the negative coverage of this mess. Sad to say, most people already don’t have a mental picture of that “West Virginia University” is a citadel of higher learning. That the main move here in dealing with a budget shortfall isn’t “find the money somewhere,” but rather gut a bunch of academic programs sends the signal that they’re impression isn’t that far off. That only degrades the degrees already handed out and will stigmatize students going forward.

And really, did someone type this with a straight face?

It’s not a “budget crisis,” merely a “structural budget shortfall”! Orwell would be proud. Here’s the thing, in my line of work the “structural” modifier only makes it worse. Really, there’s no way to sugarcoat the bottom line that the school spent too much money in anticipation of students that have not arrived. Maybe that was an honest “oopsie” instead of a growth-driven fever dream that somebody should have tried to cool off, but either way – WVU is short a shitload of money.

And now, we learn, the hits keep on coming:

University leadership have also been reviewing WVU’s academic support programs for potential cost-saving changes.

Programs under review include the libraries, Honors College, Office of Global Affairs, LGBTQ+ Center and the Women’s Resource Center.

Also on the chopping block is WVU Press, the book publishing arm of the school, which recently had one of its titles be a finalist for the National Book Award (among a host of other awards). These are not the kinds of things you cut if you’re trying to attract students and maintain the school’s reputation as a big-time research institution. The way things are going I’m afraid this isn’t too far from the truth:

Except we’ve been nowhere near a “massive” football program for years.

Fuck.

Weekly Watch – Quick Hits

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Sometimes the weekend passes in a string of movies – not even very good ones. That was the case this past weekend as the wife and I fell down a Netflix rabbit hole (so to speak – around these we also consumed the final season of Disenchanted, of which I’ll have more to say later). I suppose a 1 out of 3 average isn’t bad from a baseball stat point of view, even if the one is more of a bloop single than anything more impressive.

Spoilers ahoy! Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Run Rabbit Run (2023)

Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy of Succession fame – who knew she was Australian?) stars as a mother, Sarah, struggling with a troubled daughter, Mia, in the overlong, but often creepy, horror flick. In the wake of Sarah’s father’s death, Mia starts to behave strangely, insisting on meeting her grandmother she’s never seen before, and referring to herself by a different name – Alice, the name of Sarah’s long “lost” sister. Things proceed from there, usually because Sarah makes the worst possible decision at any given opportunity until she and Mia are holed up in a rural farmhouse where bad things continue to happen.

The deep mystery here is what happened to Alice, who appears to be possessing Mia. We’re never given any even implausible mechanism for this to happen, by the way. We know Sarah had some part in what happened to Alice because she’s haunted by guilt. Eventually we find out why – she pushed her sister off a cliff. Not by accident, not in a fit of passing rage. Nope, she just flat out murdered her sister. This is an odd narrative choice as is zaps any sympathy we have for Sarah, to the point that when we see Alice walking Mia toward the cliff you almost think justice might be done.

As I said, the movie is about a half hour too long. To its credit, it does maintain creepy vibes the whole time and the actress playing Mia does a good job of making her stand out in a film world flooded with odd, creepy children (although she’s not the best of the weekend – which is saying something). Snook is good, too, but the whole thing really doesn’t amount to much in the end.

As an aside, Sarah’s ex-husband (and Mia’s father) is played by Damon Herriman who will forever in my head by Dewey Crowe from Justified and manages to turn up in just about everything Australian I see these days.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)

I thought this flick had a pretty decent idea behind it – a cop tracks a serial killer over decades because they only strike every nine years. Cool! What I didn’t realize until we actually started watching this is that less than a detective story this was a half-baked fantasy story (the “science” nodded at is too silly to really call it sci-fi) with some appalling ethics at the core of it.

All that would go down better if the actual stuff on screen was actually better. Nothing particularly works, from the setup (why start the main character off as a beat cop who wouldn’t have anything to do with detective work and the, just as quickly, kick him off the force?) to the writing to the acting (Boyd Holbrook was much better in Justified: City Primeval, even if he was overshadowed by the return of Boyd Crowder in the last ten minutes) to the laughable explanation for all this (it involves time travel and the moon – seriously).

With all that said, it could have been kind of a fun lark if it hadn’t trampled all over one of the classic historical “what if?”s – if you could go back and strangle the infant Hitler in his crib, would you? It’s a thorny ethical dilemma, since at that point infant Hitler is completely innocent and hasn’t done anything to anybody – doesn’t that make it straight up murder (maybe Sarah could push him off a cliff?)? And even if you did it, would it make a difference, or were the forces at work in Weimar Germany of a sort that the Nazis would have seized power anyway?

This movie jettisons all those thorny ethical issues in favor of brute force – in order to prevent a right-wing militia group from bombing Philadelphia in 2024 and starting a new civil war, the killer is travelling back in time (to 1988, at least) to kill the bombers as children. Wait, no, that might make some sense. Rather, the killer is going back and murdering everybody on the mailing list of the predecessor organization of the group who committed the bombing. Not only have they not actually done anything when killed, they had decades in which to recognize the error of their ways!

It’s as if you took Minority Report and stripped out of it any issues of free will, determinism and whether we can punish people for something they might do. It’s just dumb, on multiple levels.

Vivarium (2019)

Well, at least Vivarium was interesting, if not particularly successful in the end.

A couple (Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg) looking to buy a home is shown to a weirdo mono-chrome suburb that looks like something out of a Wes Anderson movie that’s seen better day by completely off-putting real estate agent. While they’re looking at the house, purely out of formal obligation, the agent slips away, leaving them stuck in the place. Why can’t they leave? Probably the same reason the dinner guests can’t leave in The Exterminating Angel – it’s surrealism, baby!

After their failed escape attempt (the couple always returns to the same house, number 9 – subtle Beatles reference, perhaps?), the couple settles into a weird routine that’s punctuated by boxes full of “food” and other supplies showing up in the street. One day the box contains what looks like an infant human child, but it’s quickly clear that it isn’t. It grows rapidly, screeches horrifically when it’s hungry, and can mimic the voices of its “parents” in completely unsettling ways (if this kid ever hooks up with Mia we are all fucked).

Ennui and horror ensue from there, but without any particular payoff. Poots takes on the unwilling role as mother to the child-beast, while Eisenberg starts digging a hole in the yard, returning to it day after day for fruitless labor. In the end they die, the child-beast grows up, and winds up replacing the original real estate agent in luring in a new pair of victims. Apparently this is all a sci-fi (they’re aliens?) riff on brood parasitism, in which species rely on others to raise their young. OK, I guess, but that gloss kind of ruins the ability of the film to actually be about anything larger regarding the human condition (I don’t think the standard “suburbia sucks and destroys your soul” angle really works, given that the couple didn’t choose to remain and weren’t seduced into it – they were just trapped).

Last week I talked about art that made me just go “what the fuck?” as having value. At least Vivarium gave me that. It’ll stick in my head for a while in a way that the other two won’t. Doesn’t mean I’d recommend it, but at least it’s weirdly interesting in its own way.

Keep in mind – taste is personal, your mileage may vary, etc.

Now That’s Art

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

I’ve got a fondness for micronations, those tiny bits of land that someone has declared a small, independent nation that nobody else in the world really recognizes (aside from other micronations). My favorite, up to this point, has been the Principality of Sealand, which is actually an old offshore platform in the North Sea off the British coast.

Sealand even has its own soccer team (there’s an entire World Cup for unrecognized nations) and, I’m pretty sure, inspired an excellent song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Song:

That’s interesting and quirky and all, but is a micronation art? It certainly can be.

Welcome to the Republic of Zaquistan:

You might think it’s just a few acres of scrub in the Utah wilderness (and you wouldn’t be wrong), but it’s also a project of artist Zaq Landsberg. I found out about him via this article in the Washington Post about his statue “Reclining Liberty,” currently installed in Arlington, Virginia, in which he translates the Statue of Liberty into the form of the reclining Buddha you can find all over Southeast Asia.

I like the whole vibe of it:

one of the piece’s goals is to be accessible — Lady Liberty is relaxed in the grass, not towering above viewers from a pedestal. It is easy to interact with her, and he hopes that people will.

‘There’s plaster layers, the copper, the patina, but really, the last layer is the kids climbing on it,’ he said. ‘This thing, it’s on the ground, there’s no pedestal, there’s no admission ticket, there’s no velvet rope.’

So something like Zaquistan is right up his alley. He’s filled the scrub with various sculptures and installations, including a “port of entry” and Victory Arch. My favorite, though, are The Guardians of Zaquistan, a couple of large 1950s-style robots. According to the place’s website they were installed in 2006 and “[t]o this day they steadfastly protect Zaquistan’s borders from intruders.”

My wife and I don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to visual art. She prefers the look of more traditional painting and sculpture, things you can look at and see recognizable people and things. I prefer more modern and abstract stuff, things that aren’t even particularly “arty” at first glance. Our trip to the Tate Britain earlier this year spawned a good round of “is this art?” discussions. They often go like this:

I think part of what I like about the more modern stuff is that it inspires in me a sense of playful wonder and awe that more traditional works don’t. I can certainly appreciate the artistry of Renaissance statuary or paintings by the great masters, but I find myself more interested in the details of what’s being depicted by them than the art itself. More modern stuff hits me right in the gut, however, and almost demands that I deal with it on its own terms, without concern for what it’s “about.”

When I was in law school I got to go to Chicago for a mock trial competition. One afternoon, a teammate and I wandered through the Art Institute, which was probably the first big art museum I’d ever been to. Around one corner we walked into the wildest thing I’d ever seen, an installation called “Clown Torture,” which:

consists of two rectangular pedestals, each supporting two pairs of stacked color monitors; two large color-video projections on two facing walls; and sound from all six video displays. The monitors play four narrative sequences in perpetual loops, each chronicling an absurd misadventure of a clown (played to brilliant effect by the actor Walter Stevens). In ‘No, No, No, No (Walter),’ the clown incessantly screams the word no while jumping, kicking, or lying down; in ‘Clown with Goldfish,’ the clown struggles to balance a fish bowl on the ceiling with the handle of a broom; in ‘Clown with Water Bucket,’ the clown repeatedly opens a door booby-trapped with a bucket of water that falls on his head; and finally, in ‘Pete and Repeat,’ the clown succumbs to the terror of a seemingly inescapable nursery rhyme. The simultaneous presentation and the relentless repetition creates an almost painful sensory overload.

This is not an inaccurate description, particularly the “almost painful sensor overload” part (and particularly if you don’t know what you’re walking into!). Now, I’m not going to say I loved “Clown Torture,” but I love the idea of it and I love that it completely unsettled me and made me think “what the fuck?” for a good long time afterward (still does, sometimes). In some instances that’s all art has to be about.

The Republic of Zaquistan is nowhere near as disturbing as “Clown Torture,” but it gives off similar “what the fuck?” vibes and so I kind of love it. It’s weird and its funny and it kind of makes you reconsider the world around you. If that’s not art I don’t know what is.

The Prequel Problem

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Ending stories is hard – trust me. But figuring out the right place to start them can be just as hard. That’s true for all kinds of stories, but particularly fantasy or sci-fi stories where you have to build the whole world around the story you’re telling and the characters involved. By definition their world existed before their story did and will continue to do so once it’s over (barring apocalypse, of course).

Which explains the popularity of prequels. There’s so much backstory to dig through, most of it only hinted at, that there appears to be a rich environment to exploit. It must also seem like a fairly safe investment, since you’re dealing with, if not familiar and fan-favorite characters, at least events and histories in which the fans are already invested.

But there’s an inherent problem with prequels – they’re playing in a universe in which the future is already known to us. That can box writers in and sometimes make it difficult for the prequel to stand on its own as a piece of compelling drama, something we should care about for its own merits.

I thought a lot about this problem over the weekend as the wife and I (at her suggestion!) finally caught up with the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.

The six-episode series is set in the time between Rise of the Sith, with its culling of the Jedi, and the original Star Wars (aka A New Hope), a time during which, for all we knew, Obi-Wan was living off the grid on Tatooine keeping tabs on Luke Skywalker. Years pass, of course, so the idea that he didn’t get into anything worthy of telling a story about is pretty sad, but do the writers use that freedom to do something really interesting?

No, not really.

The inciting incident of the series is when Princess Leia is kidnapped on Alderaan (nice planet – too bad it goes boom) by, of all people, Flea. This is part of a plan to draw out Obi-Wan so some Jedi hunters can get him. Those Inquisitors are kind of interesting and could have been explored in some depth, but they have a boss and his name is Darth Vader. And so, the series largely revolves around maneuvering Vader and Obi-Wan into the same space.

As a result, we get two solid confrontations between them, the second of which would have felt like a pretty epic duel if it had any kind of stakes. It couldn’t, however, because of the prequel problem: both Vader and Obi-Wan survive to fight again in Star Wars, so neither can be killed or even seriously injured in ways that conflict with the “future.” Likewise, young Leia (who, as you might expect, is quite the scamp) is never in any real danger, as we know she survives unscathed. Indeed, the series punts her offscreen for the final episode mostly, as it rushes back to Tatooine for a confrontation between one of the Inquisitors and Luke’s family – which, again, we know will ultimately come to nothing.

It didn’t have to be that way. Using Leia’s kidnapping to lure Obi-Wan out of hiding was a solid idea. Imagine if she’d mostly stayed off screen (a MacGuffin, if you will) while he scrapped with and evaded Inquisitors and grew into his status as a hero. There’s actually a good character arc in the series, as Obi-Wan goes from trying to lay low and hide to being more engaged with the Rebellion. Isn’t that a cool enough story to tell? Do we need the Vader stuff? Do we need any suggestion that Leia or Luke will be harmed?

Star Wars knows how to do this. Rogue One is regarded by a lot of people as the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, even though we knew precisely how it was going to end. What made it work was that existing characters were largely absent and we got to know and care about a whole new cast so that when they made the necessary sacrifices to complete their mission it landed with some heft.

Ultimately, I think the prequel problem is a matter of characters rather than universes. After all, we read historical fiction all the time that involves real events. It’s not what happens to characters, it how it effects them, changes them, that matters. But when your prequel ties itself to characters who can’t change, that becomes a problem. I’ve dinged Star Trek – Strange New Worlds for tying itself too closely to characters steeped in Trek lore, rather than freely exploring people we know nothing about.

I’ve never really been interested in the idea of writing prequels. I had a prequel story, of a sort, for one of the characters in the Unari Empire trilogy that I almost wrote, but ultimately decided that all that was important about him was in one of the books already. Generally speaking, I’d rather go on and dive into a new world with new characters than revisit old ground.

But if you asked nicely . . .

Weekly Watch: Star Trek – Strange New Worlds (Season Two)

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Seeing as how the second season of Star Trek – Strange New Worlds just wrapped up, I thought I’d follow up on my review of the first season. If you’ll recall, I was pleasantly surprised and looking forward to a second season:

I’m cautiously optimistic about the second season. Given results thus far, I’m willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that we won’t be overwhelmed by Kirks (Jim’s brother is on this ship, too, for some reason) and we’ll be introduced to more strange new worlds.

What gave me pause about the first season was the need of the writers to try and keep looping SNW back into the wider series mythology rather than do some really new stuff. Did we really need Kirks? Did we really need the security chief to be related (however distantly) to one of Trek’s greatest villains? Why weren’t the Gorn anything other than, you know, the Gorn we all knew?

I wish I could say all my concerns were alleviated, but the truth is that in season two SNW leaned into some of the things that I most disliked about the first season. That said, it was still damned entertaining and, maybe through sheer repetition, I’m starting to be worn down on those concerns.

Let’s start with the Kirks. James Kirk showed up in one episode of the first season, a nifty retelling of a classic episode from the original Trek. It made sense, but I worried where it would lead. Where it led was that Kirk appearing in three episodes this season, getting major screen time without any great effect. Simply put, there’s no reason that his role in those episodes couldn’t have be filled by a wholly new character. Kirk has now had multiple encounters, including a fairly personal one, with a person named “Noonien-Singh” and yet said nothing about that when Khan first showed up in the show. It’s a minor nit, but one that bugs me over and over – what’s gained by tying this into the established Trek mythos?

Likewise, the series appears to be doubling down on making the Gorn the Borg of this series. I’m not against creepy space monsters, but wasn’t part of what made the initial appearance of the Gorn in original Trek work so well is nobody knew anything about them? Why not create an entirely new beastie to menace this version of the Enterprise? Maybe my feelings here are partially colored by the fact that war Trek is my least favorite Trek variant and that seems to be the role of the Gorn moving forward.

That being said, I still really enjoyed this season for the most part. A big part of that is that, while at the same time grasping for connections to prior Trek lore, the SNW creative crew is also willing to really push the limits of what a Trek show can be. That came through loud and clear in two episodes from this season.

The first was a crossover episode with the animated Lower Decks series, in which two of the characters from that show travel back in time (and into live action) and interact with the Enterprise crew. I’ll admit that I don’t get Lower Decks – it’s too fast and hyper to be funny to me – but I thought this episode was really great, from the animated opening credit sequence to the animated outro with the Enterprise crew getting ripped on some sort of booze. And I appreciated the two Lower Decks characters, in a rare moment alone, making a joke about how slowly everybody talked. Good humored timey-wimey fun.

The second was the big musical episode. I’m not a huge fan of musicals and I found the actual music here pretty samey and dull (exception being the acapella version of the theme music in the opening credits, which was great) and the idea, that some outside entity is forcing the crew to sing their true feelings, is straight out of the better-executed Buffy musical episode, but, still, it’s hard not to like the curveball this episode was. And without it we’d never have gotten Klingons as the galaxy’s scariest boy band, a sight I wouldn’t want to miss.

My favorite episodes were a couple that dealt with characters grappling with their pasts. “Among the Lotus Eaters” took a quick line from the original Trek pilot about one of Pike’s regrets and fleshed that story out (a pretty good example of raiding the lore for story ideas) and spun it into an interesting meditation on memory and forgetting. “Under the Cloak of War” dove into Dr. M’Benga’s history and that of a Klingon war criminal and how they were struggling to come to grips with their pasts. I’m not a big fan of M’Benga’s ability to eat space spinach and go berserker on numerous Klingons, but I like the general idea of a healer growing out of a warrior. The Uhura-focused episode, “Lost In Translation,” was also pretty good.

All in all I found the second season of SNW a lot like the first – really good most of the time, with some choices that I wish had gone differently. It is by far my favorite of the nu Trek stuff. And, if anything, I’d like for a few more episodes per season to let things breathe a bit (the Spock/Chapel situation flamed out way too quickly). But mostly, I hope going forward they’ll heed the call to explore “strange new worlds” and give us more of that and less backward-looking connections to Trek lore.

I’ll be watching, regardless.

Is the ATAC a MacGuffin?

/ JD Byrne / 2 Comments

For Your Eyes Only is my favorite James Bond flick.

Part of that is due to when I saw it, it being one of the first Bond movies I’d seen. But a big part of it due to the fact that the spine of the movie’s plot is a more plausible Cold War scenario than the Dr. Evil inspiring big bads Bond often faced.

In a nutshell, a British ship (disguised as a fishing trawler but really a spy ship) sinks off the Greek coast. On board was the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator or ATAC, a computer that helps coordinate the UK’s ballistic missile fleet. Naturally the Soviets want to get their hands on it. Bond, aided by supreme Bond Girl Melina Havelock, tries to get it back for the Brits. In the end . . . well, the end is one of my favorites of all time:

So I was delighted to come across an episode of the All 80s Movies Podcast about For Your Eyes Only. I was surprised, though, when the guys on the podcast called the ATAC (which they hilarious mispronounce “AhhTAC” – it’s not like they don’t say it over and over again in the movie!) a “MacGuffin.” That didn’t jive with my idea of what a MacGuffin was and got me to thinking about it.

The term apparently dates to about 1930s or 1940s and was coined by a British screenwriter named Angus MacPhail, who worked a lot with Hitchcock. As defined by the OED, a MacGuffin is:

a particular event, object, factor, etc., presented as being of great significance to a character or characters, but in the end proving illusory.

Hitchcock would further explain that a “MacGuffin is the thing that the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care” and, ultimately, “is actually nothing at all.”

It’s that last part that I always associated with the concept of a MacGuffin. A famous more recent example is the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, which multiple characters go to great lengths to possess, but we never learn what is inside, except for:

But I’m seeing lots of examples cited of things that are, to my mind, so substantial to be considered MacGuffins. Some cite all the things in the Indiana Jones movies (as in “Indiana Jones and the BLANK of BLANK”) as MacGuffins. This includes the Ark of the Covenant in the first movie – but they find the Ark, it melts some Nazis, and basically deus ex machina’s Indy’s escape. Is that a MacGuffin? Another list includes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, a real human being with whom the main character significantly interacts, as a MacGuffin. That makes no sense to me. Likewise the Death Star plans in Star Wars – not only do they jump start the plot, but we see them after delivery and the info in them allows Luke to blow the place to shit!

Other examples hew closer to my conception of a MacGuffin. “Rosebud” in Citizen Kain, for example, since the important part of the story isn’t the damned sled but that rise and fall of Kain’s life. The Holy Grail in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is an even better example, since it motivates the action but is never seen or obtained by the characters.

While pondering all this I checked out one of the all-time great MacGuffin movies, which I’d never seen, The Maltese Falcon.

It definitely fits the mold of MacGuffin I have in my mind. The bird itself doesn’t show up until about 15 minutes from the end of the film and then, once it’s revealed to be fake, ceases to have any real meaning. Rather, the movie is about what the pursuit of this object (which Bogart’s Sam Spade calls “the stuff that dreams are made of”) changes and corrupts all who decide to pursue it. It could be anything – a Javanese lion, an Andalusian wombat – and the same story gets told. That the damned thing matters to the characters but doesn’t to the audience seems to be the whole point.

I suppose for me the question is how important the actual item is to the resolution of the story. If all it does it motivate people and the ultimate identity/characteristics of the thing doesn’t matter, I’d call that a MacGuffin. If it’s more important than that, probably not.

Where does that leave the ATAC? Since we see it in action, then see it recovered, then stolen, and then ultimately destroyed by the main character so the bad guys can’t have it, I’m definitely not getting MacGuffin vibes from it. It’s just too important to the movie, including the wider world of it. The world of The Maltese Falcon continues to spin regardless of how that petty crime is resolved, while the world of For Your Eyes Only gets considerably more dangerous if the ATAC falls into Soviet hands.

Ultimately, what qualifies as a MacGuffin is probably in the eye of the beholder. As a writer, it’s a useful tool to have in order to motivate characters. On the other hand, don’t lose sight of the fact that sometimes the little doohickey everybody is trying to get their hands on is pretty damned important in its own right.

Just like obscenity, you know it when you see it.

Weekly Read: Legends & Lattes

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

My wife is a voracious reader and introduced me to the concept of “cozy” genres. Her big one is cozy mysteries, in which the murder takes place bloodlessly off screen and the cookie recipes in the back are more important than the whodunnit. I stumbled into one of those that crossed into fantasy a while back, The Accidental Alchemist, which was fun enough, but not quite my thing. Would a second go on cozy fantasy change my mind? Not yet, at any rate.

The setup for Legends & Lattes is pretty slick – Viv, an orc who’s spent her life adventuring and killing in a typical fantasy world, decides to get out of the business and settle down. Her new line of work? Running a coffee shop in a town that’s never heard of the stuff (in-world it’s an invention of dwarves, IIRC). “High fantasy and low stakes,” claims the cover, which certainly suggests a light, frothy outing.

Which it is! I’ve seen a lot of people rave about this book for being like a big hug or warm blanket, super comfy and cozy and I won’t disagree. I wish it had something more to it, however, to make it more than just a bit of literary comfort food (adept as it is when it comes to that).

It could, for example, have been really funny. There are a couple of chuckles here and there, but it’s not what I’d call a comedy. The basic idea sounds like it could have come out of a Discworld novel, but Pratchett always had a more cutting edge and could write amazing jokes. There’s nothing like that here.

I’ve seen some people complain that the book has “no plot,” but that’s not true. Things happen! What is really lacking is conflict, in any meaningful sense. For instance, Viv and the crew she assembles around her have to get the business off the ground and running. Every innovation they think of – offering iced coffee in addition to hot, adding baked goods (sumptuously described, it has to be said) to the menu, etc. – works like a charm. There’s even a local protection racket that Viv has to deal with, but it’s wrapped up easily with a conversation (and Viv paying protection, oddly).

That isn’t to say there isn’t a bad guy. A member of Viv’s old crew shows up about two-thirds of the way through and commits what appears to be a heinous crime – so much so that it’s completely out of place with the warm fuzziness of the rest of the book – but it’s barely a hiccup in the end.

Without any real conflict I need something more. Could have been humor, but, like I said, that’s not really what the book was going for. It could have been a more thorough exploration of Viv’s new home town. I particularly thought the protection racket stuff would give her a chance to interact with other people in her neighborhood, either to rally them or find out that resistance was futile. It could have been a cool way to see other species at work, add some additional color. Alas, the book sometimes feels like a TV show allegedly set in a big city that’s clearly shot on a soundstage that never moves from the single corner it regularly depicts.

I don’t want to come down too harshly on Legends & Lattes. It’s a quick, fun read, even if it leaves you feeling a little “so what?” when it’s over. But I’m clearly in the minority in not finding it completely charming and wonderful (it’s nominated for an Nebula and Hugo awards, after all). Which means, ultimately, that I just don’t think the “cozy fantasy” thing is really my cuppa, so to speak. And that’s OK.

I’d really like one of them cinnamon rolls, though. Hold the icing.

On Deciding Not to Publish

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

When the film version of A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971 it was the subject of a lot of controversy due to its portrayal of violence and sex. As I observed years ago:

The telling of Alex’s story is replete with, well, sex and violence. Roger Ebert’s original (non-flattering) review notes an ‘X’ rating, but the DVD calls it ‘R.’ There’s lots of nudity, for example, but the only sex involved is a single scene that’s so sped up (to the tune of the William Tell Overture, no less) that it’s mostly a blur. A presumed rape happens off screen. And while there’s copious violence, there’s very little blood. It’s nothing compared to what comes out these days. And it helps showcase not only the brutality of Alex’s shallow world view, but the equally shallow world view of those that take their revenge on him.

It was such a thing that a British prosecutor cited it in court the next year amidst allegations of copycat violence. In 1973, the film was withdrawn from British release at director Stanley Kubrick’s behest, even though he didn’t think it was inspiring anything. It wouldn’t be released in the UK again until after Kubrick had died.

I thought about A Clockwork Orange when Elizabeth Gilbert (she of Eat, Pray, Love fame) announced on social media that she was withdrawing from publication a new novel that was due to come out in 2024:

Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert is pulling her new novel from publication after Ukrainian readers expressed ‘anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain’ about her decision to set a book in Russia.

Gilbert’s The Snow Forest is a historical novel set in Siberia, and follows a family of religious Russian fundamentalists who have lived isolated and undetected for 44 years since retreating from the world in the 1930s.

When they are discovered in 1980 by a team of Soviet geologists, a scholar and linguist is sent to the family’s home to bridge the chasm between modern existence and their ancient, snow forest life.

A lot of the pushback to the book happened on Goodreads, as often happens even well in advance of a book coming out (and thus anybody actually reading it). By the time I got to the Goodreads page for the book (which is now completely gone) all the info about the book – the blurb, cover, etc. – had been taken down, so it was impossible to tell if there was something in the way the book was being sold that triggered the backlash or if it really was as simple as Ukrainians pushing back against a new book set in Russia.

Gilbert’s decision prompted a lot of discussion. Most of it’s been negative, as is perhaps inevitable in an era where “cancel culture” continues to weigh on peoples’ minds and books are being banned by state governments. This column from a former president of PEN American Center (a free speech advocacy group) gives a flavor:

But what’s equally unreasonable – and disturbing – is the precedent that Gilbert’s decision sets, the potential danger it poses to writers, to the future of literature, to the culture, and to our freedom of speech. What will happen if authors allow themselves to be bullied by their readers? What if the themes we write about, and how we write about them, are to become the subject of a general referendum? Should survivors of domestic abuse band together to prevent any future productions of Othello? Should we quit reading Anne Frank’s diary because it takes place in a country that was hospitable to Jewish refugees – until it wasn’t? Should animal rights activists campaign to have Moby-Dick banned for its portrayal of the horrors of the whaling industry? One can all too easily imagine what might have occurred had Nabokov submitted Lolita to the court of public opinion before it appeared in print.

All this after posing a series of hypotheticals about whether she should “build a bonfire in my backyard to consign Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov to the flames?”

This is, in a word, horseshit. There’s a conversation to be had about how to deal with Russian art, music, and literature at a time when the current iteration of Russia has invaded a neighbor without cause and there have been overreactions on that front. Likewise, the idea of telling writers that certain subjects are off limits for whatever reason is a bad thing and certain won’t be defended by me. But neither of those things are what’s happened here.

Gilbert wrote a book, which she clearly has a right to do. Once written does she then have a duty to publish it, regardless of any second thoughts on her part? That doesn’t make any sense. Writers and other creatives produce art all the time that they decide, for whatever reason, not to release to the public. You think I don’t have a novel or two buried in my closet that will never see the light of day? Free speech is not just about the right to talk or say something, it’s about the right to decide not to say it. Maybe Gilbert’s calculus is wrong on this occasion, but it’s hers to make. To use her decision as the jumping off point for a slippery slope that leads to book burning is ludicrous.

There’s a perception out there that unlike movies or TV series or albums that a novel is the product of a singular creative vision, the end result of one person sitting down at the keyboard and pounding out thousands of words. That’s romantic, but unrealistic. Most books that anybody would actually want to read go through the hands of editors, beta readers, and others before a final version is released. The book changes in that process. The author is ultimately responsible for making changes (or not), but the input of others is critical to a successful final product.

That’s all Gilbert did here. Had she run The Snow Forest past a few Ukrainian friends and they had said that now is perhaps not the time for a book like this and she’d stopped the publication process at that point it wouldn’t be news. It was only because a release date had been set and Gilbert withdrew the book in such a public way (to her credit) that this was a thing. That it was a thing, and a thing worth withdrawing the book over, is entirely Gilbert’s decision. Any other author is free to make the opposite one, if they choose.

If the right to speak means anything it has to be paired with a right to remain silent – just like the right to practice a religion has to be paired with the right to practice none at all. The same is true of authors, musicians, painters, and any other creative person. I’d hope that’s something that, at the end of the day, we could all agree on.