mightyfastpig

01:20 am: "Sparkers" story
My flash story "Sparkers" is live on Everydayfiction.com. Please visit, comment and pump up the rating, thank you.

This is my second story inspired by my research on ibogaine and psychoactive substances.

Tags: fiction, science fiction, writing

12:02 am: How NOT to use a Creative Commons license
Charlie Stross's new science fiction novel Accelerando is being simultaneously released under a Creative Commons license. All well and good, as I'm always glad to see more material CC'ed. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book that will, if published, be CC'ed as well.

However, I'm puzzled by the attitude that comes with Stross' announcement about the CC license.

What this means in a nutshell is: you can download it. You can read it, and give a copy (under exactly the same terms) to your friends. You must not sell it, modify it (other than converting to a different file format for storage or reading) or file off the serial numbers and pretend you wrote it. You must specifically not create derivative works such as movies or TV adaptations or role-playing games or translations into other languages, without obtaining a separate commercial license. If you do any of these things, I and/or my agent and publishers will come after you with lawyers, guns, and money -- but mostly lawyers.


Now, Stross the author of the work has the right to give away precisely those rights he wants to. That's the whole point of Creative Commons. He also has the right to mock-threaten his readership. But why does he want to? There's no need for there to be an adversarial relationship between the creator of a text and the audience.

Furthermore, Stross should be so lucky that people want to make deriviative works based on his novel. When a text can capture people's imagination enough to prompt them to expand upon it, that's a rare and unusual success.

Cory Doctorow sounded eager when he talked about CC-licensing his stories and novels, like he wanted to offer his work up to the general public and have them embrace it and send it to friends, and later he changed the licensing so that fans could create deriviative works. Stross sounds strangely reluctant.

Tags: creative commons, publishing, science fiction

11:57 pm: Revenge of the Sith review
This review contains spoilers

There's still no blood in the Star Wars universe, but there is a lot of clean dismemberment. (Combined with Sin City, this is a big year for severed limbs in Hollywood.)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith certainly addresses a lot of complaints about the first two prequels. Instead of slow openings, Sith drops the viewer directly into the action, first a massive space battle and then more personal derring-do inside one of those ships. There's no cutesiness, in fact there whole thing is quite sombre. Some of the set-piece action scenes are breathtaking. There's also a great sense of scale. There's an impressive sequence when we see Palpatine seizing power and issuing an order that makes the clone troopers sucker-punch the Jedi to death on multiple planets. That, in turn, is part of an unexpectedly political subtext against the Bush administration.

The flaws are many: Lucas still can't write dialog to save his life, and character actors like Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson have their talent squandered and never get a chance to breath life into their characters. Hayden Christiansen makes Keanu Reeves look like Olivier. The sets are too sparse and cold; one of Lucas' great accomplishments was to create a futuristic world that looked like people actually lived in it.

Female characters get short shrift. All the interesting ones are shunted offstage into secondary texts, like the Clone Wars TV series, novels and comics. Amidala is practically the only female character with dialog in the whole movie. And her role is mainly to look sad, give birth and die.

And yet... here's what was so startling about the climax of the story, that cut through the limitations of the actors and the stilted dialog. Anakin Skywalker indirectly killed Amidala, in true Darth Vader fashion, by telekinetically choking her. Why did he do this? She confronted him about the lying and killing he has been doing throughout the movie, a last ditch attempt to pull him back from the edge.

He attacked her to shut her up. Amidala died from domestic violence.

It's a valid point, if made bluntly: that if you use violence and deceit in the political sphere, even for what you consider good reasons, you risk bringing violence and deceit into the personal sphere. Revenge of the Sith is not only the decline and fall of a state, it's the decline and fall of a family. It seems like the true face of the dark side of the Force is not rage or greed or fear, but paternalism.

Revenge of the Sith isn't a good movie, but it certainly is a vast improvement over the previous two prequels. It has a stronger emotional impact than it has any right to have.

Critical judgement isn't really important when talking about the Star Wars cultural phenomenon, however. The movies exist as the foundation for a vast array of secondary materials: prose, poetry, art, films, cartoons, video games, comics and more. Some of it is produced under the aegis of Lucasfilm. Far, far more of it is created by fans for fans. In that sense, Sith succeeds because it creates a solid foundation for all those secondary texts. That is what Star Wars is for.

Tags: review, science fiction, star wars

11:50 pm: Independent meme genesis
I'm not the only person bothered by the idolization of the incarnation of asthmatic evil, Darth Vader. Dorothy Woodend, The Tyee's film critic, has her own article on the cult of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

I think Lucas is aiming for tragedy, but I don't know if he can reach that mark. The question of why and how good people end up doing very bad things is a terrific theme, but it requires serious thought about human nature, and I don't know if the man who brought us Ewoks is capable of that.

Another good essay on the (mis)handling of the Vader issue.

Tags: review, science fiction, star wars