Author Archives: Bob Evans

Justify, Excuse, and Explain

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The three words that comprise the title of this post are often used nearly interchangeably when discussing a person, group’s, or nation’s behavior but to my mind hey carry very different and important connotations.

Justify, which clearly comes from ‘justice’ is about making an argument that an action needed to be taken and was ultimately right to have been taken. You can justify taxes, the taking of a person’s property, because the social benefits are so large so important that the taking is ultimately a good and necessary thing. Other cases can be more edge case and will depend on the moral standing, philosophies, and such of the people involved.

Excuse to me carries the burden of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. This does not have to be a major or in any way a serious wrongdoing. We ask to be excused when we burp loudly because the noise of generally considered unpleasant and upsetting. In asking to be excused we admit that the sound was unsettling. We bump into a person on the train or in a crowd and again seek to be excused because uninvited touching is a violation. To excuse carries the knowledge of wrongdoing and the admission that it was wrong. One does not excuse malice because malice rarely carries any sort of admission of transgression.

Explain is a revealing of cause and effect absent moral judgment. That is not to say that the transgressive acts one might ‘explain’ are absent of moral weight or judgment but merely that understanding how they came to be done, the cause and effect that created the chain that bound the participant in the event are described and understood without judgment. We explain serial killers by understanding that childhood abuse and trauma has warped their minds and desires creating monsters. This is not excusing or justifying but understanding how they came to be.

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The Joy of Friends, Even Virtually

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For a few years now I have been gamemastering a tabletop role playing campaign of Space Opera, a game form the 80s with the most complex and poorly edited rule set I have ever seen but is loads of fun.

A year ago, several of the player moved north by a couple of states and out in-person games became virtual games hosted over Zoom. (Being that Space Opera has been out of print since the 80s there was no suitable on-line gaming app that really fit my needs, hence just a simple Zoom.)

The game has continued and it’s very nice every two weeks of so that we get to hang out, see each other, even if it on computer monitors, and game.

This past Saturday was the scheduled game night and all through the day I had been emotionally out of sorts. Not really depressed, just unmotivated and listless. Holiday plans meant that the session would be abbreviated but we needed to run it because I had left the players in a tight spot. (One of their crew had been kidnapped and the baddies were using threats to attempt to force the heroes into assassinating someone.)

I ran the game and my mood flew high. We laughed, we had fun, the dark turn of events for the characters provided strong motivation. By the end of the shortened session all of my listlessness had evaporated. It was not because of the game play it was because good friends are a major component of a happy life. Sometimes when we are crabby and out of sorts isolating ourselves is exactly the wrong prescription.

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The New Doctor: The Church on Ruby Road

Disney Studios/BBC

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Following the series of Doctor Who specials reuniting David Tennant edition of the timeless time lord and Catherin Tate’s Companion Donna, the newly bi-generated Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, demonstrated his style and flair with the newest Christmas Special The Church on Ruby Road.

With Russel T. Davies return to the series the 4 specials debuting on Disney+, Disney really is trying to own all things ‘Geekdom,’ represent a return to form for the Doctor Who franchise.

With Doctor Who it is best to set aside any concerns about continuity and treat each special and episode as high fantasy rather than any variation of science-fiction.

The Doctor, drawn by a series of coincidences, encounters Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) a who with a deeply mysterious past, now plagued by goblins out to steal the foster baby left in her charge. Gatwa’s energy as The Doctor is fresh, spritely, and engaging. Gibson’s performance as Ruby is not plain or down-to-Earth but does have a color of real characterization that nicely counterbalances Gatwa’s manic energy.

Russel T. Davies writing remains fast but fairly straight-forward, eschewing the convoluted and nearly impossible to follow circuitous plots of the previous showrunner Chris Chibnall. At least with this Christmas special Davies has dispensed with world, galaxy, or universe saving plots in favor of a more relatable level of threat, monsters out to eat a baby. Doctor Who f the last few seasons has grown far too epic in its scope, proportions, and stakes and much like James Bond needed a radical correction.

It will be some time before we get the full season of the newest Doctor Who but for a change, I am actually looking forward to it.

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Series Review: Ultraviolet (1998)

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Several weeks ago, spurred by a discussion of the HBO series The Wire I decided that I wanted to rewatch and earlier television series with Idris Elba Ultraviolet.

Starring Jack Davenport, that many people will recognize as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the series follows Detective Inspector Mike Colefield (Davenport) who upon investigating the disappearance of his best friend that night before that friend’s wedding stumbles into the knowledge that vampires are real, and that a secret organization has been fighting them for centuries. Teamed up with a war veteran Vaughn Rice (Idris Elba), a physician Angela Marsh (Susannah Harker) and a former priest Pearse Harman (Philip Quast) Mike tries to uncover what really happened to his best friend, dodge the determined prying of the jilted fiancé, and help the organization discover what grad scheme the vampires have sudden launched.

My sweetie-wife originally exposed me to this series as she had the program on VHS tapes. Much of the vampire lore has been jettisoned. While the vampires are immortal, ageless, and possess fantastic strength and speed, they do not have the ability to enthrall, assume animal or gaseous forms but remain invisible to mirrors and all form of electronic imagery and recording.

While the series is far from perfect, the fiancé character is far too annoying and Mike’s attraction to her indicates to me that this marriage would have been in serious troubles without vampiric intervention, it is quite enjoyable and a nice take on ‘modern vampire hunting.’ These undead creates are not the romantic seducing lovers of modern fantasy but intelligent deadly predators. The entire story is told in six self-contained episodes. They can currently be streamed on Tubi for free. (You just have to endure the bloodsucking of adverts.)

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An Unimaginable Future

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I was born in the early 1960s making be part of the tail-end of that massive generation the Baby Boomers. Bright beckoning futures such as Star Trek filled my childhood while the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation hovered over our heads. For decades the go-to and standby baddies of most fiction was the menacing duplicitous and seemingly everywhere conspiracy of International Communism as exported to ever trouble spot around the globe by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but we just called it Russia.

The United States led the ‘Free World’ against the spreading, infecting, and corrupting influence, and subversion of freedom by Russia. Our allies, while not always endeared to out ways and over-sized personalities, stood shoulder to shoulder with us in that fight, united in the belief that freedom was a universal good. Even if we, and I mean all of the allies, more often than we’d ever admit, fell short of that lofty ideal. The striving for that goal, for a more perfect realization of freedom for humanity, for the rights of self-determination, is what stood as apart from the vast police states of Russia and her brood of puppet nations.

Throughout the 1980s I had friends across the American Political spectrum and my conservative ones were steadfast in the belief that Russia posed a threat to democracy and freedom. That Russian intelligence services infiltrated and manipulated groups in our open society creating conflict and divisions that weakened the ‘free world.’ They were right. After the fall of the USSR so much came to light about their massive operations attempting to exploit both our divisions and our freedoms against us. My conservative friends crowed in being proved right.

And now I live in a future that would have been unimaginable to all of us in the 1980s. I don’t mean the power computers we carry about in our pockets like so many dimes, nor do I mean the fantastic imagery we created with keystrokes, or that we can now launch and land rockets as we envisioned in the SF movies of the 1950s.

No, I mean that those same conservatives who crowed so loudly about their correct detection of the threats to our freedoms have so willingly, so enthusiastically wedded themselves to the very same threat. That violations of the constitutional order and attempts to steal power from legitimate free and fair elections are swept away as mere distraction of ‘personality.’

Back in the 1980s a common criticism of the left from my conservative friends was that the people on the left were only voting for their own selfish interests, free food, and money from the teat of the government. It is clear now that this charge is quite accurate to the conservatives. All professed dedication to the ideals of democracy and the ‘free world’ are casually overthrown for the party that promises to keep delivering the goodies you want. Maybe those goodies are tax cuts and commerce unrestrained by the public good. Maybe it’s the power to compel people to live by your own hypocritical ethics. Or perhaps it’s the promise to not encumber your choice in firearms. Whatever the ‘goodie’ it is clear that the ideals of Freedom are disposable when weight against that selfish interest.

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The Crown Has Lost Its Glitter

 

I was shocked when I got totally sucked into Netflix’s series The Crown. I am not and never have been a Royal Watcher. The Royal Family of the U.K., or any nation for that matter, has had little interest to me. At heart I am a lower caser republican.

However, the first season with the young Elizabeth as a dram seized my imagination and I was hooked for the first four seasons of this drama.

Season 5 came around and it took me quite a while to get through the entire run of ten episodes. Not because it was bad, the production quality remained outstanding, the cast impressive in their talents, and writing sharp, I just didn’t care. What I didn’t and don’t care about is the Charles and Diana show.

Their ‘fairy tale’ romance held little interest for me when it happened, their marriage and its trouble held even less. I do remember when she died because I was at a WorldCon and there were some tasteless parties the final night, but, as with all celebrity deaths, it occupied very little of my mind.

Last night I started season six episode one. I didn’t not finish. I don’t care about her relationship with Dodi, I don’t care about his with Camilla. The last two seasons, much like the Hobbit trilogy, has wandered far afield from the character it was supposed to fixate upon.

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The First Draft is Complete

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This will be brief as the day-job continues its usual Medicare Open Enrollment madness and for the near future I will be using mass transit to get to the office.

So, the first draft of my werewolf horror novel temp titles ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point’ is finished. I completed the draft at LosCon, working from my laptop in the hotel lobby after the parties had lost their allure.

Originally, I had aimed, or hoped, for a length of about 80-75 thousand words and the draft landed at 94 thousand. I am about halfway through the revisions, which are smaller scale than I would have expected for a novel written without an outline, and I have added about 1000 words.

I have written horror before. My short story collection ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ is principally horror short stories, but I had never attempted a full novel in that beloved genre. The fact that my first horror novel was also my first without the outline process continues to surprise me.

Once the draft has been cleaned up and the inevitable run-on sentences and mild misspellings have been located by my sweetie-wife it will be time to beat the brush for beta readers. I suspect that this novel will survived its encounter with beta readers, but I have been wrong on that front before.

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Movie Review: Godzilla Minus One

Toho Studios

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In the nearly 70 years since the very first film the Godzilla has ranged from the very serious thematic representations of Atomic Age fears to wildly chaotic affairs aimed at children. The brainchild of filmmaker Takashi Yamazaki who wrote, directed, and served as Visual Effects Supervisor on the film Godzilla Minus One is a return to employing the legendary monster as a thematic metaphor exploring serious adult topics.

Eschewing the lore of the previous movies in the franchise this film can be considered essentially a remake of the original 1954 classic Godzilla, but with an entirely new set of characters and subtextual intentions. Covering the period from just before the end of World War II until the late 1940s Godzilla Minus One speaks powerfully to the destruction, stupidity, and waste of war.

After an encounter on Odo Island that left his deeply traumatized Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lives in disgrace and poverty while being generally despised by his neighbors for surviving the war. Thrown together in the ruins of firebombed Tokyo with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) Koichi is unable to escape the nightmares of his past and only through confrontation with Godzilla might he possibly excise the unwarranted guilt and shame he has carried since the war.

Yamazaki has crafter an excellent film. As a screenwriter he cracked the difficult problem of combining a deeply human and dramatic story with a plot that finds a monstrous Kaiju leveling destruction on a recovering Japan essential. As a director he possesses a keen eye and understand that keeping the camera mostly at human eye level injects terror rarely experienced when a kaiju is photographed level with their own head. The visual effects of the film are utterly fantastic. While there are bits and pieces where the seams show, naval vessels that aren’t quite perfect in the rendering, the same for some trains, Godzilla itself always is perfectly depicted. Production design has captured the feel of devastation that encompassed Tokyo following the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign.

The film’s score uses movements from the original film’s composition, notably the marches for the Imperial Self Defense forces and Godzilla’s theme. The recording and performance of these pieces is simply epic.

Unlike previous serious Godzilla movies, this film is not concerned with minister and generals, keeping it story focused on civilians and veterans, the people on the ground who lived through a war in which their government too often decided that their lives were something to be lightly tossed away in futile gestures.

I cannot recommend enough that Godzilla Minus One needs to be seen in a proper theater. The movie is epic and grand in every way save for it tightly focused human story. While I could quibble about some aspects of the story final resolution, those issues are not enough to devalue any of my admiration and love for this piece of art.

Godzilla Minus One is playing in theaters in Japanese with English subtitles.

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