Watching the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, I started to notice strange echoes between this hard-boiled classic and Dan Brown’s run-away best-seller (arguably the best-selling book of all time) The Da Vinci Code.
So, on a lark, I decided to make a bullet list of the comparisons. Continue reading
All the talk about the CIA torture report reminded me of that story you had here about the spy torturing the woman in the tree. I didn’t see that scene any more, but I saw you were answering questions about the story and global warming. Is it also about the torture during the war on terror? Did you take that scene out?
Angie K (a reader)
This is turning into a Q&A about H&H. [See previous question on whether it falls in the climate-dystopian “cli-fi” genre.]
Marshal Voight isn’t exactly a spy, but the first novel of High & Hard does culminate in a torture scene. But, there are already hints about where the story is going in Voight’s speech before the Conclave.
This aspect of High & Hard wasn’t really intended as a commentary on 21st century torture so much as a nod to the harsh realities of 17th and 18th century warfare. Fantasy has a bad habit of glamorizing archaic modes of conflict, particularly by attributing the brutal aspects to the “bad guys.” By mashing up classic high fantasy with gritty hard fantasy, in part I wanted to show what happens when the “good guys” are also brutal.
I guess that this same stripping away of the glamor could be seen in the Senate’s torture report. But whether High & Hard serves as a commentary on 21st century warfare is for readers to decide.
I know. Putting the words “nuance” and “rape” in the same headline is dangerous. I’m probably stepping in a hornet’s nest. But, I have been pretty harsh toward Shia LaBeouf as an artist. I’ve ridiculed his reaction to being called out on plagiarism, I’ve tied him to cultural forces threatening to destroy art and civilization, and … yes … I’ve even dragged the discussion to argumentum ad Nazium.
So, I feel I owe him some decent human perspective. I need to say something about his claim that a woman raped him during his #IAMSORRY exhibit.
I wrote up a 3400-word essay about the subject. But, to avoid TL;DR, I pared it down to four bullet points: Continue reading
… I read this [High & Hard : The War for the Cornerstone] during its first run here and just started getting into the second run at the new website. I was thinking about the dwarf chimneys destroying the elven forests, and the rising sea levels. Is this intended to be cli-fi?
– AH (a reader)
I had to look up the word “cli-fi” when I got this reader feedback. Continue reading
Sure, the NFL is in no danger of going broke. But, its viewership has been dipping lately, slumping a few percentage points each year. The folks running the league seem to have recognized the problem, and are trying … well .. things. Things like letting players who are not good enough for the regular league play in the so-called FXFL.
But, trying to sell your sawdust is no way to keep the mill running. The NFL’s revenues are fan driven, so if there’s a problem with the revenues, there’s a problem with fan distribution. And fan distribution, in the highly geographical realm of grid-iron football, means team distribution. Continue reading
During an interview for National Public Radio, author Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terebithia, The Master Puppeteer, Jacob Have I Loved) had this to say about message in fiction:
I try very hard to stay away from the word “message,” because I think it’s poison in fiction. I think you tell your story and then the reader gets to decide what he or she will learn from your story. And if they don’t want to learn anything from it, that’s their choice.
You can check out the rest of the interview here!
This might sound a little weird from a guy who bought a projector TV so his home experience would match his cinema experience as closely as possible, but I still think there is a huge difference between a movie to see in the theater and a movie to wait to see at home.
Well, Christopher Pendegraft at Scriptshadow has the same take: Continue reading
Once upon a time a man said “women in stories shouldn’t need a man to rescue them!” To prove his point, he wrote a story to rescue women from stories in which women needed men to rescue them.
The above is a true story about Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, but it could just as well be a fairy tale, as fairy tales are often simply fantastical reflections of the foibles of real-world society. The foible in this fable is the incessant spreading of the archaic gender trope of female frailty by people who are convinced they are confronting archaic gender tropes.
Gaiman’s wildly ironic (yet clearly well-intentioned) effort is a perfect example of how gender tropes are so deeply embedded that human attempts to address them all too often only scrape them ever deeper into our cultural consciousness. If you think women shouldn’t need rescued by men in stories, then don’t be a man who rescues them with stories.
What good is a writer if he can’t destroy literature?
Julio Cortázar
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Richard Dawkins
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.
Tom Baker
But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it’s by way of heartbreak, sometimes it’s by way of injustice, sometimes it’s by way of fate. There’s an infinite number of ways to examine it.
Tom Hanks
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
Victor Hugo
Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.
Christopher Hitchens
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Charles Dickens
