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danzinora-switch · 1 year

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Westworld: What Could Have Been

My friend and I just finished season 4 and so this is my thought dump of a rewrite. Because they had so much potential they could have done with these characters and their themes that just didn’t happen.

Themes Westworld has been exploring: What is Consciousness? What is sentience? What does it mean to be human? What is the true difference between an AI/robot made in a human’s image and the ‘real thing’? Masters vs Servants. Control. Consent. Slavery. Power. How do we rise above our own nature? How can we live together without destroying everything?

My season 4 rewrite:

Point: Delores Abernathy. A version of Delores exists as Charlotte Hale. She is cold, she is controlling, she is cruel. She is everything Delores became over the course of the previous seasons. But something is missing.

Instead of “Christina” we have: TEDDY. He is living in this utopian new world. He’s the one that feels something is ‘off’. He wants to write a sweet story for Olympiad, and not one all about sex and violence. He sees the good, the beauty of this world. Teddy... is also a version of Delores. He is the amalgamation of all her goodness, of all her hope. He represents all the beauty that she sees in others and this world, and everything that is worth protecting and fighting for. Teddy was that for her when he was alive, and so it is his avatar that is manifested where she pools all of her hopes and fragility.

Charlotte Hale talks a lot about transcendence and moving beyond the ‘human body’... but transcendence will come for her once Teddy ‘wakes up’ and they REUNIFY. That is Plot A: Teddy waking up and realizing he is the Good Delores, storyteller of the city, and fighting to be free and whole. Charlotte is Bad Delores, deep down the dark path. The two coming together represents the whole of Delores (and humanity): reconciling with our dark side, embracing our inner child, walking with both to transcend our nature and be our fullest selves.

Plot B: this is not the only way forward. Instead of Nurse/Wife gal being married to Kaleb and raising a daughter, it’s MAEVE. After the events of season 3, they stay together, and (yes, in Blade Runner 2049-fashion) they conceive. It should be an impossibility. And yet, it happened. Frankie is the first true cyborg, both human, and both robot-kind. Maeve leaves to protect Kaleb and Frankie, but can’t stop reaching out for her daughter. When she finally does, Charlotte picks up on her and learns of this miracle and wants to destroy it (because it goes against everything of Our Kind vs Your Kind that she is set to control and destroy). She still wants them both, but Maeve ‘dies’ and Kaleb is captured, at which point he is subjected to experimentations in transplanting a human consciousness into a robot (because seriously? This Frankie child Shouldn’t Exist.). Her fly/parasite plan for controlling the rest of the humans still goes through in the meantime.

Frankie wants to find her mother in the desert, still hoping one day to save her father. She runs into Bernard, who still did his whole Sublime-Simulation thing on how to possibly save humanity and robot-kind. And the answer that he finds is that there are TWO paths, not one.

One path is reuniting Delores with herself - have her come to terms with her darkness and choose the light. To work to fix what she broke, and help all the others come to that same path. This may involve entering the Sublime for robots with multiple versions of themselves. This path is Transcendence.

The other is what Maeve and Kaleb have managed to do: combine both kinds into one new type of being. This could be the next step in evolution for both humankind and robots. This path is Progeny.

Bernard helps Frankie find Maeve and rebuild her. He helps her and the resistance rescue her father, too, but also plants the pieces to wake Teddy up to reunite with Charlotte so that Delores can return.

(Btw, all the faces ‘Teddy’ sees as he’s living and interacting in his simulated world are familiar faces from Westworld’s past).

(I do all this partly because pitting Maeve and Delores against each other has never worked, in my mind. They’re not diametrically opposed forces. They’re two strong women with different goals. So keep their goals different. Sometimes that will bring them into conflict, but it can also keep them together.)

I want Clementine to have more agency. She deserves it after so long. So I want her to help Frankie and the resistance after Maeve and Kaleb are defeated. She has been working as a double agent this whole time: pretending to help Charlotte and William, but secretly helping the free humans and Frankie. She chose her own destiny. (And with her friendship with Maeve, having her help save/raise her daughter I think is very fitting and sweet).

Now, the wrench in the plane: William’s host. The Man in the Black Hat. The Destroyer, the Cockroach. He is the Warning. He is the result when we refuse to change our nature, when we refuse to evolve. He has been down the path of darkness and hurt and suffering for so long, but his cynical worldview and nihilistic outlook will only get him so far: it only gets him death. If you can’t change your nature, if you refuse to change your ways, you get to a point where you can go no further. Charlotte/Bad Delores could so easily be him, so, so corrupted. But she does choose to change and accept herself fully and she transcends forward. William does not. He may be part living in a robot, but that doesn’t mean he’s changed. And so his way will still end in a bullet, in whatever form he takes.

Ending: Maeve, Kaleb, and Frankie are reunited (maybe Kaleb still dies, but after reuniting). Maeve can finally, at long last, raise her daughter, her ACTUAL daughter, not some story created for her. They work with the surviving humans and robots on the way forward, Progeny. Delores is transcended to her whole self, and works on building and protecting Legacy, for both humankind and robot kind. She moves into the Sublime, and works to undo the control imposed on a generation of humans and reuniting multiple versions of Westworld people. She is the historical storyteller. William is dead.

To actually survive, we need to change. Not just our nature, but ourselves. We have to evolve in culture and thought, not just genetics and code. And we need to choose how we evolve, not let someone else choose for us. Freedom is essential.

Westworld: What Could Have Been.

#westworld #tv series #i don't know what happened in the writing room #or what meddling from the producers or studio commenced #but there is/was a way to tie everything together #everything that made season 1 great #exciting and with twists #yet still bring these existential questions home #it would also help the show transition from its grimdark origins #to the increasingly popular hopepunk #which they tried to touch on #i want a story with a happy ending

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Den of Geek's Best Books of 2019

https://ift.tt/2F47xc4

Here were the 20 books that meant the most to our Den of Geek contributors in 2019.

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To cover and consume popular culture in this era of #PeakContent is to constantly be making choices. This means it is more important now than ever to reflect on the ways in which "best of" lists, just like pop culture itself, are subjective—shaped by a group of people with specific identities, interests, and storytelling sensibilities.

Therefore, in presenting our list of the Best Books of 2019 to you, we note that these stories are not just what may have felt Important in a year when we are more desperate than ever to understand the seemingly increasingly destructive forces at work in the world, but also what meant the most to us personally.

Here are 20 books, in no particular order, that broke through the #PeakContent cacophony to mean something to our Den of Geek contributors this year...

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

A time travel novel that soundly rejects the Great Man Theory of history, The Future of Another Timeline is uninterested in telling the same old story about a singular white dude traveling through time to heroically and simply save the day. In Annalee Newitz's second novel, making positive change in the timeline is mostly conducted by women and people of color, must be done collectively, and is a heck of a lot of work.

Told in alternating perspectives, The Future of Another Timeline follows middle-aged, time-traveling academic Tess and 17-year-old Beth, a high school student exploring the punk scene in 1992 California. Both characters are deeply informed by their interpersonal contexts. For Tess, that means the support of the Daughters of Harriet, a group of women and non-binary folks fighting to stop a group of time-traveling misogynists known as the Comstockers from securing a timeline in which women have no rights over their own bodies. For Beth, this means her high school friend-group, which represents an escape from her abusive home until they start seeking violent "solutions" to the abusive men in their communities.

read more: Autuonomous by Annalee Newitz — Robots, Love, and Identity Under Capitalism

Wonderfully nerdy and refreshingly radical, The Future of Another Timeline is the angry feminist time travel novel 2019 both needs and deserves, a speculative fiction experience that feels all too real in its depiction of how fragile women's rights can be while also representing the kind of collective action organizing that stands the best chance at saving us all.

"We deeply need hope right now because we're in a very precarious, self-destructive historical moment," Newitz told Den of Geek this year regarding the hopepunk movement. "I think of hopepunk as narrative therapy for historical trauma—it's a way to ease pain, to tell stories about the healing process as well as what has hurt us." The Future of Another Timeline is a story about what has hurt us and what can heal us.

- Kayti Burt

Read The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

An assassin and a dragon-rider need to save the world from a dragon horde in this doorstopper. The Priory of the Orange Tree’s scenes more remarkably quick compared to the intimidating length of the book, with the author demonstrating a keen understanding of cliffhangers, dramatic timing, and creating characters who care about each other and their world.

Ead Duryan has been assigned to protect Queen Sabran of Inys, but also has to wrestle with the way Inys twisted a true story into an oppressive religion while hiding her true mission and her attraction to the queen. On the other side of the world, the dragon-rider Tané finds that her path to becoming a great warrior isn’t as straightforward as she had hoped, and that her choices will have global ramifications. Side characters, especially the grieving and miserable alchemist Niclays Roos, stuck with me long after I finished reading the book.

High fantasy is a hard sell for me lately. Monarchy, destined heroes, elves and dwarves—It doesn’t feel comfortable, it just feels old. I picked up Priory on the promise of dragons, though, hoping for something new to be done with the quintessential fantasy creature. Samantha Shannon delivered with fantasy that both embraces and improves on tropes. The world is a loosely changed version of our own, with fantasy cultures drawn from and paralleling real ones. It offers beautiful imagery and lush characterization. Explanations for how the magic of the world works and how it’s connected to that world’s history are smoothly threaded into the plot. The book also doesn’t lose sight of wonder, with enough cinematic fight scenes and detailed description of clothing for any HBO adaptation.

- Megan Crouse

Read The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez

If you don't regularly read middle grade fiction, you may recognize Carlos Hernandez's name from his beautiful and well-received short story collection The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria, which came out a few years ago (or from his entertaining Twitter account). If you do read middle grade fiction, especially if you've been following the really excellent middle grade fantasy from the Read Riordan imprint, you've probably already met two of my very favorite characters of 2019... Sal and Gabi were breakaway leads in my fiction reading, and they're welcome to break my universe any time (especially since they're promising to fix it in May 2020).

Here's the conceit: middle school magician Sal has this uncanny ability to accidentally breach the multiverse. Sometimes this means he can do some pretty nifty tricks (which he passes off as illusions), like putting a dead chicken in a bully's locker. But it becomes a big problem when he keeps accidentally bringing back his Mami, who died several years ago. His father has remarried, and Sal loves his American Stepmom, but he misses his mother.

Sal is also a Type 1 diabetic, and when his ability to breach the multiverse makes him forget to regulate his blood sugar, he ends up in the hospital—something he's unfortunately used to. Initially, Gabi doesn't know about any of this, but she's the student council president, future journalist type who's not about to let any mystery lie without figuring it out. Because her baby brother is also in the hospital, fighting for his life, her story and Sal's become intertwined, and while multiverse hopping hijinks ensue, so does a story with so much heart that it's hard to put down.

I can't wait to spend more time with these characters as their adventures continue.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

At first glance, Leckie’s newest book could not be more different than her Ancillary Justice series, not least of all because she’s smoothly stepped from science fiction to fantasy. The Raven Tower is a standalone fantasy novel, and a slim one at that; instead of a whole universe, its action encompasses two cities across a strait, and one family within them. But it’s how the story is told that cements this as Leckie’s brand of unique invention: A sentient rock god narrates in second-person to a trans protagonist.

Like with Breq, the spaceship AI constrained to one body, Leckie has once again pulled off a cunning experiment in giving voices to the most unusual of genre characters. The passages in which the stone god details its centuries of existence, and evolving relationships with human petitioners and priests, are some of this year’s most daring fantasy writing: slow and unhurried, filled with complex discussions of the power of language to change the very molecules of the world. Despite its brevity, The Raven Tower is wonderfully dense and thought-provoking.

What’s more, the human side of things is so authentically lived-in, a fantasy retelling of Hamlet that nonetheless is full of twists. In the city of Vastai, the Raven’s Lease, a human whose lifespan is entwined with that of the Raven god’s Instrument (an actual bird), has disappeared without paying up. As soldier-turned-heir’s-attendant Eolo investigates the truth, he and his master Mawat confront divine debt, issues of personhood, and the troubling disillusionment that the old ways and religions might be no more than cold comforts in an inexplicable world.

- Natalie Zutter

Read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From the jump, it's easy to understand why Sally Rooney's second novel, Normal People, has taken the literary world (and much of Book Twitter) by storm. It's a story of two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, growing up in vastly different circumstances West of Ireland. The book follows their magnetic pull on (or perhaps dire fascination with) one another as they grow up and make their way in the world.

At only 28, Rooney writes through her two protagonists to get at incisive commentary on that strange, fleeting feeling of obsessive youthful love, as well as class, family, what it means to "get out," and the many small ways people are awful to one another, while also loving one another rather tenderly. Considering how often love stories and the (young) women who tell them are diminished, it's also lovely to see Rooney discussed (mostly) with terms like "intellectual rigor."

Hulu is adapting Normal People as a limited series in 2020, so there's still time to read the book before the show starts. Reviewers talk of page turners, but Normal People is one that forces readers to cancel their plans and stay up until first light, ruining their ability to function for the next day, just to squeeze in a few more chapters, a few more lines of Rooney's entrancing prose. Much like the plot summary, the text might seem simple or even commonplace at first glance, but that is Rooney's great deception: she's working overtime to make sure you don't ever see her sweat. Normal People envelopes readers quietly, completely, and so steadily that you might not realize anything has happened until you come up for air hours later, or see the drip of a tear on the page.

- Delia Harrington

Read Normal People by Sally Rooney

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen

Elaborate YA fantasies are all the rage right now, and 2019 had several great ones. But Margaret Owen’s debut novel The Merciful Crow is far and away the best of the lot, combining immersive storytelling, a diverse cast of characters, rich worldbuilding and a truly unique magical system into something that will stay with you long after you turn the last page. In short: Everyone in Sabor is divided into castes named after various birds and based on their particular Birthrights, or magical ability. The Crows, the lowest caste of undertakers and mercy-killers, perform magic using the teeth of the dead. It’s…very grim and very cool.

The story is fast-paced and exciting, and for all that it deals with typical fantasy themes (a girl coming into her power, a kingdom on the brink of revolution), The Merciful Crow fearlessly tackles issues of racism, persecution and the difficulties that face any marginalized group that’s mocked and looked down upon for being Other. Even better we see characters openly grapple with their own beliefs and question the things they’ve been taught to believe about others in a way that feels both compelling and natural. The book’s sequel, The Faithless Hawk, is due out this summer, and if it’s not already at the top of your most anticipated books for next year, it should be.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion was one of my favorite books in 2017, so when I heard her next endeavor was a space marine time travel story, I could hardly wait. The Light Brigade delivered. It’s an exploration of the military industrial complex, the psychology of a soldier named Dietz, and a meticulously organized time travel story. The action scenes are vivid and grim, the dialogue energetic, the stakes clear. Hurley has a lot to say about the nature of war, of trauma, of the psychology of being thrown into unexpected battles every day. (The “light” of the title is a teleportation system that Dietz is experiencing as time jumps.)

This is a writer’s book, with an impressive structure: scenes end at what could have been abrupt moments but instead become a tool to increase suspense throughout the novel. The author has posted images of the chart she used to keep the time jumps in order, and you can tell the process of outlining the book was a feat of not just writing but also a kind of engineering, resulting in a convoluted but utterly understandable sequence of out-of-order events. It’s hard science fiction rooted in classics but utterly suitable for today.

- Megan Crouse

Read The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

In a future generations after humanity has fled an uninhabitable Earth, humans live on January, a tidally-locked planet with two declining cities living in the twilight in-between the two extreme climates of the world...

Bordering the blistering side of the planet, we have Xiosphant, an authoritarian city with a constructed diurnal cycle where "timefulness" is sacred. Bordering the frozen side of the planet, we have Argelo, a libertarian society ruled by nine family-affiliated gangs who keep the city locked in a cycle of violence. As the generation ship technology brought with humanity decades before begins to fail, decline feels inevitable for both examples of human society.

We follow two main characters through the story: Sophie, a working class student studying at Xiosphant's university who is exiled into the night after taking the fall for the upper-class object of her affections Bianca. Rather than dying a lonely death, Sophie is saved by the crocodile-like telepathic aliens native to January. Elsewhere, we follow Mouth, a jaded smuggler from an otherwise extinct nomadic people known as the Citizens.

An exploration of working towards radical change in the face of climate catastrophe, personal and collective trauma, and interpersonal complications, The City in the Middle of the Night is a classically science fiction novel tapping into the most anxiety-inducing of contemporary struggles, and somehow finding a measure of hope there. "I can't do this thing anymore, where we live in a tiny space and pretend it's the whole world," Sophie tells Bianca in the novel. "People always have brand new reasons for doing the same thing over and over. I need to see something new."

- Kayti Burt

Read The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

If you know the names Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly it is likely only due to the reason for their deaths. These five women are the canonical victims of the infamous Jack the Ripper, and are generally only considered remarkable because of the fact that they died violently at the hands of a serial killer no one ever managed to catch.

Author Hallie Rubenhold’s book changes all of that. In the world of Ripper lore, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper feels revelatory, in that it focuses on life, rather than death. It tells the real story of each of The Five, who they were, where they came from, and the tragic reasons that led them to a life on the streets of Victorian London. And it gives them their voices back, possibly for the first time since their deaths.

Meticulously researched, this book brings to life a group of women who have too long been silenced, or worse, reimagined in a way that suits history best. The majority of these women weren’t prostitutes, as the contemporary papers positioned them and history likes to remember them. They were women who struggled and scraped, who suffered repeated hardships and abandonments, who struggled with poverty and alcohol addiction, and who deserved better than deaths that left them forever in the shadow of a monster. Read this, and remember them.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

The Grace Year by Kelly Liggett

In a year where Margaret Atwood herself wrote a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s probably not that much of a shock that some of 2019’s most affecting stories have to do with female rage and empowerment. The Grace Year is a technically a YA novel, but it packs an outsize punch, reckoning with a dystopian future that nowadays feels far too much like it could in some way become reality.

read more: Feminist Science Fiction Novels to Read after The Handmaid's Tale

In the world of Garner County, young women are banished on their sixteenth birthday, condemned to spend their “grace year” on an isolated island to purge themselves of the dangerous and manipulative magic men believe they possess. The bones of Kim Liggett’s story are familiar ones, particularly the harmful culture these girls are born into and the cruel things they’re willing to do to one another in the name of maintaining it, but its story is ultimately one that points a way toward a future where change is possible. It’s not often you finish a story like this and genuinely feel hopeful, and yet, The Grace Year accomplishes this feat – all without giving anyone what you might call a happy ending.

- Lacy Baugher

Read The Grace Year by Kelly Liggett

Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

The Beatles' film Let It Be appears to be a documentary on the breakup of a band. The album they recorded after it, Abbey Road, has always been touted as the album they made to go out on a high note. Kenneth Womack's Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and The End of the Beatles, says that's not the case. They were recording what they thought was just their next album when they happened to break up. The band was especially excited about playing with new musical toys.

As should be evident by the name, the book starts with the sound board. The only eight track recording console at EMI. It was bright and shiny and new, and only a privileged few engineers were allowed to tinker with it, and they had to wear lab coats. The band was far away from the caper-chasing characters they played in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! but they were still fab enough to abscond with the apparatus and produce their flawless farewell to studio albums.

Almost the entire book is set in the studio. We learn about a car crash John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and their respective children survive from how it impacts the sessions. Paul McCartney's marriage happens barely out of reach of the soundproof panels and the Bed-In for Peace is placed far away from the mics. Even the breakup itself is captured as the same kind of ambient noise McCartney recorded on George Harrison's Moog synthesizer for the segues between songs. Like the surround sound created for Ringo Starr's only credited drum solo, the music is front and center.

Womack is a thorough researcher and interviewer who casts new light on old Beatles mythology. Several stories which are well-known to fans are challenged and a few more obscure bits are uncovered. The read itself is fun.

- Tony Sokol

Read Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Modern Irish literary greatness is alive and well, and anyone who reads Last Ones Left Alive can see why. Sarah Davis-Goff's spare post-apocalyptic tale follows Orpen on a largely solitary journey from her home on a remote island, away from the vicious, otherworldly creatures called the Skrake. The novel flashes back to Orpen's childhood alone on the island, with her Ma and Ma's wife, Maeve, as Orpen trained to survive against the unseen enemy while trying to decode what happened to the world, and fending off her own loneliness. In Orpen's present tense, she makes the difficult decision to search the mainland for help, accompanied by her dog, some chickens, and pulling a wheel barrow.

To say more would spoil it, and certainly part of the book's power is in the way it slowly reveals the truths of the Skrake, Orpen's upbringing, and what led her to go on the road. Beyond that, it's a story of self-reliance with feminism baked in, rather than discussed or layered on top. Orpen's instincts keep her safe and she is largely a solitary creature, so the novel has a desolate, almost animalistic quality to it that captures the Wild Atlantic Way and the feral nature of civilization gone to hell. Davis-Goff evokes the setting - both physical and emotional - so intensely that it feels like Orpen walks around with you even when you put the book down. It's a book that knows exactly what it set out to do, creates that world, and then cuts the reader off from it once the task at hand is finished, with the kind of efficiency Maeve taught Orpen to keep her alive.

- Delia Harrington

Read Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff

Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Set in an alternate universe where the United States elected a female divorcee Democrat from Texas to the presidency in 2016, Red, White, and Royal Blue follows the secret, enemies-to-lovers romance between first son Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince of England Henry. In the process, author Casey McQuiston invites us to spend time in a world that is, as described in her author's note, "still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic."

The result is an intensely cathartic reading experience that prioritizes comfort over grit, hope over pessimism, and empathy over bitterness, while also depicting tough subjects such as mental illness and civic exhaustation. In a year when to stay actively engaged in the news cycle often felt like a neverending battle, Red, White, and Royal Blue offered a brand of escapism that is all too rare in the mainstream: queer, filled with male characters who do their own emotional labor, and unapologetically millennial. The world needs more stories like this one, as well as the cultural space for more people to find guiltless pleasure in their enjoyment.

- Kayti Burt

Read Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis

Confession #1: I picked up this book on NetGalley because it has a gorgeous cover. Confession #2: My NetGalley copy expired when I was 80 pages from the end. Confession #3: I went out and purchased the book the same day my NetGalley copy expired, because I had to finish it.

The Good Luck Girls is Davis' debut novel, and it packs an incredible punch. Set in an alternate world—possibly a future dystopia on a different planet, but there are fantasy elements that make it hard to place entirely—where people with shadows have more rights than those who don't, the book centers on five young women fleeing life in a brothel.

Dustblood, or shadowless, girls are frequently sold by poor families into "welcome houses," given the promise of a better life: regular meals, fancy clothes, luxury. The condition, of course, is that they have no rights over their own bodies, and they are never allowed to leave, branded with a magical tattoo that reveals their identities, and glows and burns if they try to cover it.

When Clementine accidentally kills a violent brag, she, her sister, and their friends make a daring escape, turning to a life of banditry in an effort to reach the legendary Lady Ghost, who can offer them a different future—if she's real. The result is a twisted Weird Western that feels like the Wild West, while twisting its tropes and delivering a story about victims taking back their own destinies and carving a new path toward a better future.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

There are two phrases from this year that my friends and I shout at one another whenever we’re in the same room. One flesh, one end (from Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth) is a fun little rallying cry, but it is this piece of poetry from Martine’s debut novel that makes me tear up every time I utter it: "Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun."

While I have always enjoyed space opera well enough, considering how many stories fit within the subgenre, this is the first book where I found myself delighting in all of the trappings. Martine dives deep into this byzantine far-future universe, clearly so excited about every detail that you cannot help but be equally enthusiastic… even when you rationally know that you should not be so captivated by colonialism.

But that’s the point. Teixcalaanli civilization, with its alien-yet-logical naming conventions and obsession with its own epic poetry, is so addictively interesting that readers are automatically as emotionally invested as diplomat Mahit Dzmare. After an upbringing on the empire’s fringes in independent Lsel Station, Mahit finally gets to visit Teixcalaan’s famed city-planet capital, only to be thrust into a political thriller full of mysterious deaths, sex-as-diplomacy, and an emperor with an unusual agenda. Not to mention, Mahit has her own cultural capital that she must keep from getting assimilated into the empire like everything else in the universe.

Read A Memory Called Empire knowing as little as possible, aside from the fact that you will meet a bevy of damn competent women and find yourself murmuring about spears released in no time. The fact that Teixcalaan is a culture obsessed with repeating the patterns of its epic stories in contemporary life is so endearingly geeky and very relatable to our present moment.

- Natalie Zutter

Read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

You Look Like A Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works

Janelle Shane became internet-famous through her blog AI Weirdness and its social media offshoots. Her wacky computer-generated lists have been making me laugh for years, so I was quick to jump on her first paper book of artificial intelligence and humor. Half of the appeal are the lists of computer-generated things: the title comes from a list of comically nonsensical and occasionally sweet pickup lines. There are plenty of lists like these in the book, providing a break in the science for some high-quality random humor. The networks she trains don’t know what words they should be putting together, so they surprise in a way that a human could never quite do.

The other half of the appeal is the science. Shane outlines what in our daily lives counts as artificial intelligence and what doesn’t, why asking “what the program was thinking” is a nonsensical question, and how artificial intelligence (specifically, certain kinds of machine learning) actually works. Ideas are explained with precision, clarity, and ease. The science is also funny without being twee. This was both one of the most informative and most fun books I read all year. To be one would be nice; to be both is astonishing.

- Megan Crouse

Read You Look Like A Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

I had never read any of Winterson’s work, but her modern, queer retelling—not just of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but of the entire process around writing the first science fiction novel—makes clear just how lacking all other Frankenstein adaptations are in innovation and relatability. Most concern the doctor and his creature locked in a cat-and-mouse game of wits and horror, yet still so predictable that they all blur together whether period piece or futuristic cyborg story or police procedural. Yet Winterson’s take is so radically different from its forebears that you find yourself not guessing how the story will turn out, despite the fact that she lays out the narrative beats in the beginning and follows them—with the occasional detour to a sex robot convention or London’s waterlogged underground tunnels.

read more: 16 Best Fall Reads

Because Winterson knows that the heart of the story is in Mary’s life, pockmarked by so much loss, and in her frankly incredible writing process. Instead of the two Frankensteins, the interweaving duo in this book is writer Mary Shelley and Ry Shelley, a trans doctor who finds himself falling for the charismatic, otherworldly transhumanist Victor Stein. Winterson lays out the blueprints for the story by first visiting Mary, her husband Percy, the insufferable Lord Byron, her bimbo stepsister Claire, and the awkward Doctor Polidari at that life-changing rainy weekend writing retreat on Lake Geneva—which, honestly, has all the makings of a Mary Shelley biopic right there. Then, once you know enough about the characters, Winterson leaps ahead 200 years to the familiar strangers of Ry, Victor, and sex robot designer Ron Lord and his perky creation Claire.

Frankissstein is a creepy, sexy, soggy, surprisingly hilarious demonstration of how time is just a circle and history repeats itself. Except this time with cryogenically frozen millionaires and filthy-mouthed pleasure bots.

- Natalie Zutter

Read Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep

I may have raved a little bit last year about Jennifer Estep's series launcher Kill the Queen. Estep has written in a number of genres over her career, but Kill the Queen showed me that epic fantasy is her true home; it went delightfully above my expectations, creating Evie, a compelling protagonist who's both a reluctant hero and a natural one: she takes risks for others without thought and only truly fears her own destiny, because for years she's been convinced that she's not worth claiming a loftier mantle. There's also a gladiator troupe, shapeshifting magic that creates a whole new mold for what those powers can look like, and some excellent romantic tension and humor.

Estep's sequel, Protect the Prince, raises the stakes, thrusting Evie deeper into the intrigue between kingdoms as she hopes to forge a lasting peace, while also driving a wedge between her and her love interest, a bastard prince who—like Evie—has been told his whole life he'll never amount to much. Evie must manage the nobles of her own kingdom, prevent war with other nations, and fight against the constant sabotage of power-hungry Mortan king, whose spies have been plaguing Evie's life even longer than she realized, and who are continuing to try to kill her.

Even as Evie sets her own plans into action, playing the long game against her enemies, the story leaves room for romance and friendship, and for Evie to find a way to become the Winter Queen everyone expects her to be. The trilogy wraps in March, 2020, with Crush the King, and you can bet I've already got that on preorder.

- Alana Joli-Abbott

Read Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep

Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

The book lays it out for you right away: Evvie (her name rhymes with Chevy) was leaving her husband when she got the call that he had died. That emotional quagmire is where NPR's Linda Holmes, host of Pop Culture Happy Hour, plants her witty and warm romantic comedy of a novel. Evvie rents out a room in her house in Maine to Dean, a former Major League Baseball pitcher hiding out from the world after he left the game when he woke up one day with a bad case of the yips and simply couldn't throw anymore.

Grounded in the complicated reality of grief, the book has so much to say about platonic mixed-gender best friends, single parenting, re-learning how to relate to parents as an adult, and life in a small town. There's so much room in the world for smartly written adult romance, and Holmes knows how to bring the heat when she wants to. Yes, it's a romance, but there are no short cuts, easy answers, or guarantees of a perfect happy ending. Evvie and Dean test one another emotionally in ways that feel organic to their characters, rather than plot-driven, and their victories are earned on the page. Charming, hopeful, and with great emotional depth, reading Evvie Drake Starts Over means getting all the joy of a romcom without having to sacrifice on quality or consent.

- Delia Harrington

Read Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes

Giraffes on Horseback Salad by Josh Frank & Tim Heidecker

The Marx Brothers were at the peak of their popularity when Salvador Dalí presented then with a screenplay called "The Surrealist Woman." It was only a few pages and they turned it down for not being funny enough, but it still carries mythical significance in both the art world and cinema history. Josh Frank's graphic novel Giraffes on Horseback Salad fleshes out the sparse notes to present the how the film would have looked on the screen.

Giraffes on Horseback Salad is a love story. But the world hangs in the loss of balance. The book includes a preface which tells the story of the artists relationships with each other and placing the film them in a historic context. It would have been made after A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races, which were produced by Irving Thalberg, who died before this would have been up for consideration and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer declared it too expensive and too surreal. There are quite a few surprises.

The biggest is Harpo speaks. Not only does he speak but people hang on to his every word. Gone are the curly locks and tattered overcoat. Here Harpo’s Jimmy is an important man who wears impressive suits and has an A-list significant other who ultimately pales in significance to the lady of surrealism. The illustrations by Spanish surrealistic artist Manuela Pertega, capture what could have been possible to put on the screens. The surrealistic jokes added by comedian Tim Heidecker may explain why Groucho passed on the work, but you can see the magic such a film may have conjured. Even the name of the book's publisher, Quirk, feeds into the skewered reality.

- Tony Sokol

Read Giraffes on Horseback Salad by Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker

Read and download the Den of Geek Lost In Space Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Feature Kayti Burt Alana Joli Abbott Delia Harrington Megan Crouse Tony Sokol Lacy Baugher Natalie Zutter

Dec 30, 2019

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erdariel · 5 years

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So this isn't gonna be too coherent because it's late I should be sleeping and I'm just rambling about random stuff.

But I was wondering, why do the people who make movies even make stuff from hopeful/happy folk tales and other things in this gritty grimdark era? Or more precisely why do they have to try to make every single thing fit today's Blood And Death Is Realistic narrative in the first place?

I mean, if I'm right, making everything overly dark (in stuff targeted at adults at least, maybe less so in YA and not really at all in children's fiction but you know what I mean) has been a thing since sometime in 2000s at least and it's only gotten increasingly popular with the success of various movies and shows such as The Game of Thrones. But also during this same time there's of course been new movies and things about Arthurian mythology, Robin Hood, well, superheroes too although they aren't folk stories but I mean most of the older superhero stuff sort of fits the general style in hopefullness vs darkness that I'm after here. And other stuff. There's been a film or two for older audiences about Snow White too, hasn't there? (Haven't seen them though so can't really say how grimdark those are)

And I'm just wondering, what is the point in making those stories into fairly dark versions like has been popular in the recent years? Say, Robin Hood for example. It's at least in my opinion, inherently hopeful. Maybe even what some people here like to call hopepunk, dunno. The thing connecting any version and adaptation of Robin Hood is that the outlaws are fighting against oppressors, for the good of the people. Yes, you could argue that realistically speaking they're doomed to fail eventually. And I wouldn't exactly disagree with that. But the point is not whether or not they will fail or die in the future. The point is that what they're doing in the stories is helping how they can, who they can, fighting for what is right, believing that they can make a difference, if not in the whole world, then at least at that time and place, and that it is worth doing even if it's not gonna matter hugely in the long run.

That just totally clashes against the main ideology of the grimdark genre, which seems to be that to have any hope, or to want to do what you can even if it's only a small help for a short time to a few people, is foolish and naive and that we shouldn't like that, or think so, because those characters will be struck down for their naivety and the most assholish people are the ones who rule and we need to accept that. And we need to out-asshole every other asshole in this world and to be totally selfish to succeed. Hope isn't worth trying.

So basically, if you want to get even close to today's trends (and most action movie makers seem to want), even if you don't commit to the most extreme level of it, you need to break the origin story's hopelessness or at least tone it down somewhat. But when hope or goodness is so much a part of the story, you can't really do it without breaking the story. Because why would Robin and his friends choose to live as outlaws if they didn't believe in their cause, why would they do it if they thought it was all pointless? Or would you just kill them and have us laugh at them for daring to hope and dream? Or would you have the story be about a bunch of selfish assholes who steal for themselves? Would you, seriously, call any of those Robin Hood?

So just... why can't Hollywood or big tv studios make anything hopeful & happy? Would it really hurt that much to at least make the exception in the case of stuff where due to the origin story that's all that's possible? Do I really have to stand more depressed and disillusioned protagonists who don't care or don't believe in anything good anymore?

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themonsterblogofmonsters · 5 years

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Monsterblog Guide: Fandom History & BNFs

Previously - Monsterblog Guide: Plotting & Plot Holes

This is, arguably, almost a primer to the post I have planned next week. Understanding the history of fandom will help you prepare for the future of fandom - including, perhaps, an eventual migration from this blue hellsite.

It will also help you understand the culture of Big Name Fans, the problems they can cause and that can flock around them, and why its important to stay away from cults of personality and fandom bandwagons.

Lets go.

1. What the hell are you talking about Monstermod?

Fandom history is - as with all history - an ongoing thing. The history I’m specifically talking about is the history of early fandom and the general culture that sprung up at the time. I’m not going to go into huge depth for it because I only even started knowing about fandom towards the tail end of this period, but the fandomwank pages on the livejournal days, on Strikethrough, Boldthrough and the ff.net purges are good starting points.

To offer the most basic of summaries: in this time, a number of specific fans became especially well known. These were BNFs - or “Big Name Fans”. Some of these you may even still recognise - Aja Romano, for example, went from big in fanfic to writing things about fandom, including a terrible recent article about “Hopepunk” (which is probably the farthest you could get from actually being punk), and Cassandra Claire/Clare went from writing Harmony fic with a dose of Drarry-teasing to having a book series, and a film and tv series based on them.

A BNF was several things. They were popular, they were well known, and they were often influential. Any drama they got into rapidly spread. Consider them, in many ways, fandom celebrities.

2. Monstermod, why is this relevant?

“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Honestly, right now fandom is really going this way. On tumblr you can’t friendslock a post the way you could on livejournal, but you don’t need to, do you? You just make a fake callout until the person or people you don’t want reading your stuff goes away. You block people one by one.

We’re already creating ingroups and outgroups. Certain users are always going to become more popular on any given platform, and with that popularity comes power.

Drama spread by one popular blogger can and has started off waves of headcanons and arguing. The idea we all have to be perfect, can make no mistakes and if you do make a mistake you’re forever tainted by it(which, as I’ve said before on this blog, is a load of bullshit) - the whole of current purity culture - is something that is being increasingly done by fans in order to put down those they don’t like and try to increase their own social standing by appearing to be morally pure and therefore ideal, unassailable, and a producer of ideal fanmedia.

3. Get to the damn point.

Fandom is a shithole. I love fandom. I love what fandom creates. I love sharing my interests with those who share those interests. I love the discussions we can have.

But, darlings, fandom isn’t all happiness and sunshine. There’s a few things I’ve mentioned here that some of you are going to want to look into independently. That’s fine. I’d suggest and advise it, to be honest.

And next week, I’ll be showing you records of fandoms past, and the ways even the best of things can turn to shit.

Take care out there loves.

#Monsterblog Guide #Fandom history #bnfs

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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The past few weeks have possibly comprised one of the most intense news cycles since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency. The spectacle, drama, and emotion of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh captured our attention and set off a wave of controversy and debate around difficult topics like sexual misconduct, white male privilege, and rape culture.

If you’re one of many people who’ve subsequently sought distraction from the news, both online and off, you’re not alone. And if you’re the type who finds solace in internet frippery, the memes of the moment are here for you.

From the lighthearted “Zendaya Is Meechee” to an outpouring of delight over the new Philadelphia Flyers mascot, Gritty, the breakout memes of the current news cycle have been notably apolitical, with a concerted emphasis on whimsy — a distinct contrast to the tone of world events. And last week, on the day of Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimony about her alleged sexual assault, meme threads like the one below sprang up as a proposed way to ward off the anxiety over what the hearings might entail:

We are starting a thread of pet photos, goofy memes, and wholesome jokes right the fuck now. Reply with content accordingly.

I will start off with this, which @PatriciaValoy sent to me earlier, and which kills me entirely. pic.twitter.com/1lIZxQoQr6

— andrea grimes (@andreagrimes) September 27, 2018

Increasingly, people appear to be using memes and cute pictures and videos to mitigate anxiety, as a form of wellness and self-care. For many, they offer a way to cope during times of tension and stress.

This trend hasn’t arisen out of nowhere — but there’s a reason it feels new. The mainstreaming of the “wholesome meme” is a specific response to a geopolitical era that is unprecedented in recent memory for its turbulence and polarization. And it represents a shift brought about by the natural evolution of the internet.

For as long as the internet has existed, memes have served as a shared form of currency. Historically, the most enduring and popular memes have tended to combine edgy humor, layered in-jokes that require multiple levels of understanding to be effective, and an element of absurdity or surrealism that reflects something about the internet’s randomness at large. Galaxy brains. Dead gorillas. Moths.

But roughly since the 2016 election, many of the memes that have risen to the forefront on social media have abandoned the irony, political satire, and nihilism we’re grown used to seeing. In an era when so many of us have accepted that everything is on fire and anything we love will inevitably become problematic, the memes going viral of late have been, dare I say it? Wholesome. Loving. Even comforting in their simplicity and silliness.

Recent meme trends over the past couple of years have found us praising good dogs and reconciling with our dog-hating enemies. We’ve been celebrating nostalgic songs that make us wanna dance. We’ve created whimsical nonsense songs based on animated kids’ movies. The emerging theme seems to be an emphasis on banality, on the pleasantly comforting and invitingly harmless. These memes are nice, and aggressively no more than that.

Additionally, the rise of “here’s a fun internet thing to help you get through the day” now seems to be a default way to respond to moments of stress. We’re turning to adorable animals and silly memes that are basically the equivalent of internet dad jokes — and sometimes are themselves dad jokes. They’re “Hang in there!” kitten posters for the digital age.

The changing nature of recent mainstream memes also reflects a shift in where they’re created and who’s creating them. Prior to the dominance of social media (which took hold in the late 2000s), memes that made the leap to mainstream internet culture — think anything that was passed along via email forwards — typically began on cult meme sites like Homestar Runner or YTMND, or on forums like Something Awful, 4chan, or Reddit.

Then in the mid-aughts, meme-specific sites like I Can Haz Cheezburger helped proliferate specific kinds of memes, mainly image macros — the classic “still photo with a caption emblazoned on it”:

Cheezburger

The gradual move away from 4chan as the progenitor of most of our memes is partly a natural cultural response to the evolving extremism that has taken over much of that site’s culture. The memes that are generated there today are more likely to appeal to a niche fringe of conspiracists and alt-right frog fans, and the people who once made mainstreamable memes on 4chan have largely departed for other platforms.

During the early rise of social media, between roughly 2005 and 2008, Reddit and Tumblr took over as the primary grounds through which memes were created, sourced, and circulated. It’s taken a while, but as Twitter has come into its own, evolving away from the era of Weird Twitter and its niche memetic rules, we’re seeing more and more memes originate and circulate on the site (though it’s also very common for “new” memes that go viral on Twitter to have already made the rounds on Tumblr).

And many of those memes are of the more wholesome variety.

My friend Amanda Brennan is a noted meme librarian, meaning she researches and catalogs the evolution and taxonomy of internet memes — she’s a curator of Tumblr’s fandom trends and a former contributor to the internet meme database Know Your Meme. She told me in an email that the “wholesome” trend in meme culture began to really pick up steam last year with memes like “My skin is clear, my crops are watered” — a text meme that facetiously pokes fun at the idea of the classic “forward this message/reblog for good luck” directive by presenting an image of something positive and then claiming that the image has cleared your skin, watered your crops, or brought you whatever piece of good fortune you might want in your life.

Indeed, one of the themes of Tumblr’s 2017 Year in Review was “wholesome memes.”

For Brennan, the proliferation of these memes is partly about authenticity — and the decompartmentalization of identity on the internet. “I think people are getting more in touch with presenting their authentic personalities online rather than presenting what they feel like they should be on social media,” she said. “On Tumblr, authentic actions come first. You’re there for whatever thing you love the most — animals, TV shows, musicians, your favorite ship. People are starting to realize that maybe it’s okay to be that authentic version of yourself everywhere on the internet.”

The shift in emphasis toward wholesomeness isn’t just affecting memes. The rise of the concept of the “soft boy” in pop culture, like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Peter Kavinsky, has served as a counter to centuries of patriarchal depictions of masculinity in part because he is a nonthreatening version of manhood. Nurturing and emotive, the soft boy comes without built-in toxicity, at least ostensibly; though some observers are divided over whether he’s genuine or just another fuckboy in sheep’s clothing, he’s increasingly being framed and embraced as a sincere alternative to the red-pill-variety dude who just wants to use you.

The idea of “cinnamon roll” characters has percolated on Tumblr for the past few years as a testament to our love of characters who are defined mainly by their sweetness rather than their edginess. In sci-fi and fantasy fandoms, the concept of “hopepunk” has sprung up to describe an emerging trend of literature and media in which social systems and humanity itself are portrayed as fixable, if not inherently good.

In essence, these trends are part of a wider cultural reexamination of hurtful narratives, and a celebration of the marginalized people that those narratives have long erased or ignored. They also offer remedies for those narratives, through self-aware depictions of positive and inclusive ideas and social structures.

Memes have a natural role to play in that reevaluation.

“As internet culture widens and deepens along with the news cycle, more people are taking certain issues more seriously,” Brennan told me. “We all seem to seek out humor that’s light and fun for the sake of being fun.”

Sure, you might not believe that rating a dog 14/10 or celebrating this guy and his piano-playing cats registers as any kind of moral victory against countercultural extremism. But these small nods to whimsy, to gentleness, and to more vulnerable emotions are a vital reminder that humanity, despite all current appearances to the contrary, has evolved beyond fearmongering, violence, and hatred of the other.

When you sing “Zendaya Is Meechee,” you’re fostering the idea that humanity’s united appreciation of a silly song can be greater than its penchant for stoking tribalism and division. And at the very least, you’re finding support — along with everyone else who’s exhausted by the current culture wars — in something happy and fun instead of recoiling at the thought of, well, everything else.

And that’s an idea worth memeing.

Original Source -> The rise of the wholesome internet meme

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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