Uncategorized

“We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.” – Will Rogers

Tasha Robinson writes:

Maybe it’s fun to watch villains because we never have to worry for them. If they succeed in their evil… well, that’s just more they have to atone for or be punished for later, and it’s fine. If they fail and die horribly… well, isn’t that what’s supposed to happen to villains?With heroes, though, they might fail, and that would presumably be terrible. We’re supposed to want them to win, which puts more pressure on them to be admirable and interesting and cool, and which makes it harder to just sit back and enjoy whatever happens to them, good or bad.

• I admit, I find Star Trek Mistakes rather fascinating. A few of them are just little continuity goofs — a photograph used for a character they thought they’d never revisit, for instance — and a few could have perfectly reasonable explanations. But it’s sort of incredible just how many times the Trek writers contradicted not just the show’s long history, but also themselves. [via]
• Speaking of Trek, here’s a look at an alternate universe, where Sulu was black and Uhura was white. What might have been… [via]
• I’m naturally suspicious of most re-makes (as I may have mentioned before), but I just don’t understand the thinking behind this one. A Three Stooges “upgrade”? What made the Three Stooges funny were the actors, their chemistry and comedic timing, and it’s tough to see how any re-make will rise above the level of bad impressions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to see Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson dressed up like Moe Howard.
• John Scalzi offers some advice to our new President-elect, based on the past presidencies of science fiction. For my money, his most important advice? “…if you do turn a major city into a prison, don’t ever, ever, fly over it.”
• All this time, I thought Speaker for the Dead was a direct Ender’s Game sequel. Orson Scott Card just proved me wrong. Well, it’s his universe. I’m guessing this book fills in the gaps — unnecessarily so, in my opinion — between the first two books in the series. There’s been a lot written recently against the Ender’s Game series, namely how it’s bad for us, and heaven knows Card’s politics aren’t always nice (or even well-hinged). But I genuinely liked the first two books. The third book…well, not as much. Xenocide felt like an overly talky companion to Speaker, tying up a lot of that book’s loose threads, but in the most polemically way possible. I haven’t read any of the Ender’s Shadow books, or even the final book in the original series. (Although I do own a copy.) I worry that Card is going the “Brian Herbert of Dune” route. We don’t need to know what every character was doing at every moment of a mythology’s lifetime. In fact, we probably shouldn’t.

Joseph Mallozzi on a recent dinner:

Grilled medium on the outside, rare on the outside, and cool all over, it lay there like a disinterested escort, or an Amanda Bynes movie, neither impressing nor offering offense.