Exploring Tomorrow

For Mary. She won the award, now she can hear the man himself.

For your enjoyment, an episode of Exploring Tomorrow, titled "Planet of Geniuses," hosted by John W. Campbell, Jr.

(ETA: Campbell makes an interesting host, but sometimes I think he's a little too inside baseball with his comments about the origins of words and the makings of tragedy and such. Also interesting that when he quotes Murphy's Law, he initially calls it Finagle's Law and specifies that it has to do with laboratory experiments. And whenever I listen to this, I always find find myself talking back to the show in one spot. When the marshall says "And I tell you the Empire can't afford what you call 'creativeness,'" I find myself saying "And I call 'creativity.'")

The Brave and The Bold

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was a DC reader growing up. One of the books I enjoyed was The Brave and the Bold, a Batman team-up book. Both Marvel and DC had these, books that featured their most popular characters teamed up with a different guest star every issue. So besides the continuing adventures of the Fantastic Four, the Thing was constantly going off on adventures with other heroes in Marvel Two-In-One, while Marvel Team-Up featured mostly Spider-Man running into virtually every other character in the Marvel Universe. On the DC side, World's Finest teamed Batman and Superman in every issue with frequent guest-stars.

A team-up book like this demands a versatile artist and The Brave and the Bold had one of DC's best at the height of his talent: Jim Aparo. The book ended its run in 1983 with Batman forming a superhero team called The Outsiders, whose adventures began in their own book, appropriately titled Batman and the Outsiders.

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up now is that this Friday, Cartoon Network will debut a new Batman series titled, guess what? The Brave and the Bold. The first episode features a team-up with the Blue Beetle (if you haven't listened to the Blue Beetle radio show I posted a few days ago, listen to it here--it's a different Blue Beetle, but entertainingly wacky). Subsequent episodes are due to feature characters like Plastic Man, Aquaman, Adam Strange, Guy Gardner, Booster Gold and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. If you haven't figured it out from the guest stars, the show will not be entirely serious in tone.

I'm looking forward to it.

Alternate Versions

Okay, Marvel fans, you'll have to bear with me for a while, cause this one is freaking crazy. While flipping through websites looking for material on Iron Man's past, I made a really bizarre discovery. I'm sure someone else has pointed this out somewhere before, but I've never seen it, so I'm passing it on.

But first, a brief (perhaps not-so-brief) history lesson. In the late 50's and early 60's, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were working for Atlas Comics (soon to be Marvel) riding a fad of monster books. Stan Lee has mentioned how much fun he had doing those books, featuring creatures with names like Kraa and Goom and Monstrollo and (of course, you knew I had to say it) Fin Fang Foom. But, you say to yourself, how many of those books were they really doing? I mean, sure they did some monster books, but were they really that significant?

Roll over to Coverbrowser and look at the books of the time, like Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense and you realize, yeah, they were actually shoveling those out by the metric ton. And looking at those covers, I realized I was seeing the seeds of the Marvel Universe being planted.

Number one is the obvious stuff, like issues of Journey Into Mystery featuring a monster named Hulk a year before the debut of the Fantastic Four. Other hero and villain names were also presaged, like the Molten Man-Thing and Sandman and Vandoom, He Who Made a Creature! (presaging the FF villain Doctor Victor Von Doom in name if nothing else, about whom more later)

But more than that, you can see that when Marvel introduced its heroes, it made sure to hedge its bets by keeping one foot in the monster genre.

Fantastic Four was the first of the Marvel superhero books. The cover of the first issue was dominated by a standard giant Kirby monster, with the four heroes small in the frame surrounding him. The adventure inside featured the Mole Man attacking the surface world with his army of monsters. And not only did the Fantastic Four wear no standard superhero costumes, but they were all rather monstrous in their own ways (Mister Fantastic stretching into weird shapes, the Invisible Girl reminiscent of horror movie staple the Invisible Man, the Human Torch a mass of living flame, and of course, the Thing).

In issue two, the heroes battled the monstrous alien Skrulls, and fended off their invasion by scaring them away with Kirby monster comics (literally--they showed the Skrull leaders the comics panels and said they were photographs of actual monsters--the Skrulls fled, because aliens are stupid). I don't remember the villain in issue three, but issue four featured an attack on the surface world by the Sub-Mariner commanding an army of sea monsters. In the July issue, number 5, the Fantastic Four were introduced to their most fearsome foe of all, the nefarious Doctor Doom, a mad scientist who wore an iron mask to hide his disfigured face (click the pic for a larger version).

By that time, Marvel had introduced its second superhero, The Incredible Hulk, featuring a man who turns into (guess what?) a super-strong monster. And during this period, the other Marvel titles, like Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense and Journey into Mystery, were still featuring the standard collection of monster tales.

In Aug. 1962, Journey Into Mystery introduced Thor battling (what else?) the monstrous Stone Men from Saturn. Meanwhile, a character named Spider-Man appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15. For the first time, there were no monsters in a hero's debut story; then again, Amazing Fantasy was being canceled anyway, so they probably figured why bother? A month later, Ant-Man appeared in Tales to Astonish, battling both human foes and monsters over his first few adventures, to be joined soon by the Hulk, after his own book was canceled.

The last gasp of the Marvel monster fad was in Tales of Suspense in Feb. 1963. The next month, Iron Man debuted in its pages, with nary a monster in sight. And a couple of issues later, the Marvel logo began appearing on the company's covers. The superheroes had taken over; the Marvel Age had officially begun.

But here's the thing which caught my attention: while looking through all the covers of Tales of Suspense preceding Iron Man's introduction, I saw a very familiar face. Issue #31 of Tales of Suspense, cover-dated July 1962 (the same month that Doctor Doom made his debut in Fantastic Four #5), featured on its cover "The Monster in the Iron Mask." Look at this cover image and see if anything looks familiar.


Even the color scheme is the same. Either Kirby was obviously so proud of this design, he used it twice, or else he was so insanely busy he didn't have time to do another design and literally recycled it almost whole.

Either way, now you know the rest of the story.

Iron Man Nostalgia

So for my birthday, I used a Best Buy gift card to get myself the "Iron Man" special edition DVD. Just finished watching the extras last night. A few observations:

Robert Downey Jr. is really cut. You wouldn't expect it. He usually seems so frothy and insubstantial on-screen.

It's fascinating (to me, at least) to see how far the stories develop from their starting points. "Iron Man" doesn't deviate from its early versions as much as, say, "Monsters Inc.," but then it had established source material to draw from. But it's fascinating to see, for instance, a long scene depicting the actors' process in preparing for a crucial scene in which the big money line ended up on the cutting room floor, if indeed it wasn't dispensed with before it was shot. It's fascinating to see early Ironmonger designs being referred to as the Crimson Dynamo (indicating possibly a completely different story direction). It's interesting to hear Jeff Bridges talk about how the villain was originally supposed to have been the Mandarin (indicating another completely different story direction).

They put an amazing amount of design detail into that suit.

It's funny how fake and flimsy some of the practical suits look in the behind the scenes footage, yet how completely convincing the illusion is in the final film. Never underestimate the power of lighting and framing and clever editing (and digital post-processing and sound effects and the list goes on).

It's funny how many people lie about being "fans" of the original property in this behind-the-scenes stuff.

And just because I'm thinking of it, a descent into nostalgia: Iron Man #1 was the first comic book I ever bought (or that my parents bought for me). I remember the occasion. In early 1968, I was with my father in a Humpty Dumpty store in Oklahoma City (I think, though it may have been T.G.&Y.--whatever it was, both store and chain are extinct now--FWIW, Humpty Dumpty in Oklahoma City was also the birthplace of the shopping cart). We passed a spinner rack near the front of the store, and one of us suggested the idea of getting a comic book. Dad asked me which one I wanted, and I looked them over. I didn't know who any of the characters really were, but one caught my eye.

It featured a man in red and gold with a robotic face bursting out of some sort of metal prison on the cover, surrounded by smaller action vignettes. Even at that young age, I could tell the artwork was better than anything else on the rack. Dad looked at it and asked me if I really wanted it. Colan only averaged 4-6 panels a page, where most of the other books had 6-9. Dad expressed a concern that this comic would not give me a good panels-per-penny return (he didn't use that literal language, but it was something like "don't you want one with more pictures?").

Nope, I was set, and only Iron Man would do. As it turns out, it was not the best choice. Iron Man's adventures had been running for several years in Tales of Suspense, so even though this issue was numbered "1," it picked up in the middle of a storyline. Iron Man, weakened from a several issue battle against the Maggia crime syndicate including the villain Whiplash, has been captured by AIM, who analyze his armor and create a duplicate set. No wonder I'm so tired of the "hero has to fight his evil twin" trope; it was in the first comic I ever read. But the comic didn't leave a strong impact, because I didn't know anything about the hero or the villains. The story started in the middle and ended on a cliffhanger, so I got neither a beginning nor an ending.

Iron Man #1's main legacy for me was that it turned me into a DC reader, which is how I got educated in old-school comics. Because not only did DC feature more self-contained stories in its issues (which I liked, because I couldn't buy comics every month), but as a cost-cutting measure in the early 70's, they padded their books with reprints from their vast archives.

I never knowingly threw a comic away. Comics got dumped into a big cardboard box in my closet, to be pawed through and reread when the fancy took me. Years later, as I was preparing to graduate high school and leave for college, I decided to bag and box all my comics, turn them into a real collection. Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered Iron Man #1 toward the bottom of the box.

And then imagine my disappointment when I opened the comic and discovered what I had long forgotten. Kids today don't know how good they have it. In my day, they didn't have shelves and shelves of superhero toys, but I had apparently been excited enough by Iron Man to want some for myself. So I took some scissors and cut out some of the most exciting poses so I could stage my own fights (you might call them paper dolls--I call them '2-D Recyclable Action Figures"). Resourceful, I know, but also devastating for a guy who thought he'd disovered a hidden jackpot only to open it up and find shredded pages inside.

I still have it, though, bagged and boxed, shredded pages and all. It was my first, after all.

Frank Lovejoy

A palate cleanser to try to restore some equilibrium. Three classic radio shows starring Frank Lovejoy.

For the last few days, I've been listening to a melodramatic mystery show named Night Beat. Night Beat is an early 50's series about a Chicago reporter named Randy (sometimes "Lucky") Stone. Every episode starts pretty much the same way: Stone is wandering around late at night, wondering what he's going to write about, when he runs into a random stranger and gets pulled into a mystery. After he solves it, he gives a final monologue wrapping things up (a la Kolchak, the Night Stalker), then calls for a copyboy. The shows are pretty good, but try too hard to be sophisticated adult drama and often veer into melodrama instead. Here's a sample episode from 1950, titled "Mentallo, the Mental Marvel."



But what really captured my attention right away was the show's opening, in which the announcer says the star of the show is Frank Lovejoy. The name sounded familiar. I realized that he had starred in one of the shows I listened to when I was searching for good Halloween shows to post a couple of weeks ago. It was an episode of Escape titled "The Outer Limit." Escape was another high-budget show, like Suspense, that featured big-name stars and adapted short stories to radio, like "Leiningen vs. the Ants" and "The Man Who Would Be King." "The Outer Limit" is a hokey science-fiction story about a test pilot who encounters something uncanny during a high-altitude flight. The story is by-the-numbers, but at the end of the show, they emphasize that they worked with test pilots and aviation companies to confirm the details of real test flights.



So I started to wonder who Frank Lovejoy was. I didn't recognize his name, but the fact that he got top billing on Escape made me think he must have been some sort of celebrity of the day. I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned that he was a radio and movie actor. He'd appeared on Gang Busters in the 30's and starred in Night Beat in the 50's. And in between, he'd played The Blue Beetle.

I'd read the adventures of the modern Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, in the pages of Justice League in the 80's. But I was unfamiliar with the original Blue Beetle, aka Dan Garrett, rookie cop by day, avenging superhero by night, dressed in special chainmail that's "flexible as silk, but stronger than steel."

The only thing I knew about the original Blue Beetle was what I'd read in Jules Feiffer's introduction to The Great Comic Book Heroes.

His sign--the shadow of a great beetle projected into the evildoer's line of vision--struck terror into their hearts. He wore a Phantom-type uniform, with scales--rather unpleasant looking without being impressive. He was a great favorite for a far longer time than he deserved.

On radio, he battles spies and dope dealers and low-level thugs of all types, aided by kindly old pharmacist Dr. Franz. Franz is the Beetle's own personal Q, who invents all manner of super-potions and techno-weapons in his back room to help the Blue Beetle in his crusade. The production values are cheap--thin sound effects and a lone organ for music--and the stories are thrill-a-minute idiot plots (a plot that can only work if everyone in the story behaves like a idiot--criminals are always leaving behind the most obvious clues that lead the Beetle straight to their doors). Even the Beetle's catch phrases are awful: "The Blue Beetle has some nipping to do tonight!" Here's a typical episode, "Murder for Profit."

Eater of the Dead

So I'm thinking I won't even read the comments to my last post, because A) I've slept since then, B) I would probably be tempted to rebut any comments in detail while escalating the rhetoric, which C) I've spent most of the day doing already in my head and D) life's too short.

And in the "life's too short" department, Michael Crichton has died. This makes me sad, because I've liked his work, although as I look over his ouevre, I'm not finding a whole lot that I'm enthusiastic about. His work ranged from abysmal (Congo) to flawed but inriguing (The Andromeda Strain) to pretty darn good (Jurassic Park). As a novelist, his work seemed to jump the shark between Disclosure and Airframe (which seemed to me largely the same book), but his movies were influential, both the ones he directed and the ones made from his work.

He also created ER, a longtime Thursday night TV staple which was for a while the most popular drama on television and is now in its final season. Ironic that he should die as the show is also departing, and sad that he couldn't see the final episode.

Disaster

Dis-fucking-saster.

The reactionary morons have carried the day, and Obama has become the President-elect. They voted for him because he's black. They voted for him because he's young and good-looking and a smooth talker. They voted for him because he's not Bush.

They didn't vote for him because of his ethics (because from his breaking of his public financing promise to his support for ACORN to his campaign's dubious fundraising practices, his ethics are deeply in question). THey didn't vote for him because of his record of achievement, because he literally had no record (except getting elected to two offices where his opponents had to drop out). They sure as hell didn't vote for him for his policies, because they are a hodgepodge of horror (depending on which set of policies you think he adheres to, since they changed with each different audience he spoke to--see, ethics, questionable).

The only bright spots in this are that Obama has shown no initiative or drive in his political career to accomplish anything other than get elected, so maybe he'll continue to duck taking any firm stands for his four years in office. And it doesn't look like the Democrats will achieve a lock on a Senate supermajority, so there may be a limit to the damage they can do, although there are enough center-left Republicans that they'll probably have an almost blank check.

And then of course, there's the prospect of four years of the comedy stylings of Joe Biden's mouth.

FSM help us. I lived through the 70's once, and I hoped never to go through it again. But hey, at least the drugs will be cheap.

Halloweenus Interruptus

Well, after all the build-up, all the posted radio shows, production problems forced me to cancel my Halloween visit to the Secret Lab. Not that anyone missed it, I guess, but still. I'll make it up to you sometime.

Halloween With Benny

For four years, Jack Benny's radio show featured an annual depiction of Jack's Halloween party. The shows haven't aged entirely well. Some of the gags are hokey, the musical numbers are dated and creaky, and there are several uncomfortable gags featuring Rochester, Benny's black butler.

But some of the gags still shine, and there's an entertaining weirdness to some of them--Jack's pet polar bear and Don dressed as a kangaroo, with Dennis riding in his pouch, for instance.

So here are four years' worth of Jack Benny Halloween parties. Enjoy.

Halloween Lovecraft

Suspense was one of the long-running die-hards of radio, high-budget and high-profile. Most episodes (I hesitate to say all, since I haven't listened to them all) featured stars of stage and screen. Music cues were played by a small orchestra, rather than a simple organ like Dark Fantasy. Many episodes were based on popular stories of the day.

Most of the episodes I've listened to were simple mysteries or suspense stories. Even when it seems there's something uncanny going on, it usually turns out to be a plot or a hoax, much like Inner Sanctum Mysteries. But this Halloween episode from Nov. 1, 1945 is different. It's an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

All the Lovecraft elements are here--Miskatonic University, ancient copies of the Necronomicon, evil monsters from beyond (in this case, Yog Sothoth).

So enjoy Ronald Colman in the 1945 Suspense production of Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror."

More Halloween Radio

It's always dangerous to generalize based on the very best examples of a genre. For instance, many so-called anime "fans" judge Japanese animation as far superior in general to American animation, when they've only seen the very best Japanese shows make it to these shores. The vast majority of anything is crap. Anime fans don't see the crap, though, because it doesn't survive long enough to make it over here.

We see the same thing in nostalgia for the higher literary standards of earlier ages, or the supposed "golden age" of television and radio. We generally only see the good stuff, the enduring stuff that floated to the surface of the sea of crap and was preserved for posterity. But for every Lights Out or Inner Sanctum Mysteries, there were a ton of shows like Dark Fantasy.

Dark Fantasy was a series of stories of the supernatural, carried on the NBC radio network in 1941 and 1942. The stories were written by a guy named Scott Bishop, and although they were carried nationwide, they originated from WKY in Oklahoma City (my hometown). Trivia: WKY radio shared call letters with an OKC TV station, where Mary Hart, co-host of Entertainment Tonight, got her start as co-host of Danny's Day, a local talk show.

So here's "The Thing from the Sea,"an episode of Dark Fantasy from 1941. From the opening announcer, who sounds as if he can barely stay awake, to the final strains of melodramatic organ music, it's crap. But the remarkable thing is that this crazy adventure on the high seas, featuring ancient sorcery and exploding islands, was produced in a small city in the middle of flyover country for national broadcast. No immense special effects budgets needed. Radio was democratic that way.

Famous Last Words in Science (Fiction)

"E will be controlled."

You have to read all the way down to the money quote, but it's worth it.

Halloween State of Mind

I'm starting to get into that Halloween state of mind. I'm not decorating for it; I'm down to fifteen dollars for the rest of the month. I should make it through okay--I have a full pantry and a mostly full gas tank--but I have no money for luxuries right now.

Luckily I'm on vacation for the next couple of days, so I can sit around the house and listen to spooky radio stories on Internet Archive. I'll post a few here so you can listen yourself, and I may even visit the Secret Lab by the end of the week. We'll see.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about Lights Out being one of the scariest shows on radio. Arch Oboler wrote them, and he achieves some really creepy effects. I haven't found one that really clicks on all cylinders, though. Some are over-earnest, like "The Visitor from Hades." Some are pretentious, full of stream-of-consciousness rantings, like "Kill" (imitating Oboler's adaptation of "Johnny Got His Gun" from 1940). Some are both, like "The Ugliest Man in the World."

But other episodes seem to take sadistic glee in the way they torture both the characters and the listener, like the extended death scenes in "Murder Castle" and "The Fast One." And then there this...


Then there are the silly ones, like "The Chicken Heart" or "The Author and the Thing," in which Arch Oboler encounters a horrible gibbering creature formed from his own evil imagination. For pure hilarity, though, this one made me laugh louder than any (although I don't think the hilarity was entirely intentional)


You can hear all the others I've named at Internet Archive. More to come soon.

No More Wheel

So I've talked before about the "Wheel of Heroes" (if you don't feel like following the link, suffice it to say that in the first season, the Wheel of Heroes, like the Wheel of Time, turned exceedingly slowly). but I don't think I can use that descriptor anymore.

Because this season, they've gone to the opposite extreme, introducing potential story arcs, then resolving them almost before you know what's happened. First, Sylar's on the loose, while Now-Peter's hunting Future-Peter. Then Now-Peter's gone, trapped in level 5, and Sylar is captured. Then the Level 5 villains break loose, and we're led to think that the season will consist of hunting them down. But then Sylar wipes the floor with them next episode, and Now-Peter is freed. Then Now-Peter absorbs Sylar's power just as the real Sylar is learning to control his, and it looks like Peter is now going to become this season's Big Bad. But then Peter loses his powers, etc. etc. I'm getting whiplash from all the reversals.

I really need to work on stories again, but every time I sit down to do it, I just get a huge buzz of white noise in my brain. I know where I want the plot to go, but there are too many things I need to set up to get it going, and I can't sort out the scenes.

Life etc.

I'm very cash-poor through the end of the month, so I've been spending a lot of time at home, watching shows on Hulu and listening to old radio on Internet Archive.

On Hulu, I've been watching Life, a fascinating cop drama. The set-up: cop falsely imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit is exonerated by DNA evidence after 12 years. He gets a 50 million dollar settlement from the LAPD and a job with the force as a detective. But he is not the same man he was. His years in prison left him damaged, and he coped by studying Zen philosophy. Now he solves crimes as a police detective while also investigating the mystery of who framed him.

It's a fascinating show, and Damian Lewis is excellent as Charlie Crews, the main character. Crews is constantly walking a fine line between brilliance and dementia, and he is very aware of his surroundings at all times, seeing things that others miss. He is fully in the moment, as it were.

A new show that just debuted is My Own Worst Enemy, starring Christian Slater as a normal suburban husband and father who discovers that he has a secret life as a government spy. The agency wipes out his memories after every mission, so while he is at home, he has no knowledge of his other life, no secrets to spill. Everything is perfect until the conditioning breaks down at the wrong time, and he suddenly becomes his civilian self in the middle of an assassination attempt.

The pilot was really entertaining, but the central gimmick could get really tired very quickly. So I'm intrigued to see where the show takes the premise.

The pre-season hype for Heroes basically said, "Heroes become villains and vilains become heroes." After five episodes, it's obvious that they're taking that literally. Sylar is on the road to rehabilitation, while Peter has become this season's central villain. The world is on the path to destruction thanks to Hiro's screw-ups, while the cute speedster thief he calls "Nemesis" has been shown in prophetic dream to become a hero working to save the world. Claire is trying to become a hard-ass hero while noble HRG is going even further over the deep end in "trying to protect this family" (and I will be very happy if I never have to hear him deliver that particular line again). Nathan has once again become a tool of the bad guys, and Suresh has turned into a bug-fuck crazy monster.

I don't think I like it.

But Chuck is cool.

On the old radio front, I've been listening to X Minus One, adaptaions of classic science-fiction stories from Galaxy Magazine in the 50's. And it just reminds me how trite some of those old stories could be. But it's fun listening anyway.

Soapbox

I've been incommunibloggo for over a week now, I know. Part of it is that I've been busy on two secret projects. The other part is that every time I've had an idea for a blog post, it's been a political one, and it never works out well when I get on the political soapbox. I know of other authors' blogs I've enjoyed very much in times past, and I don't read them now, because they are so completely opposite of me politically, and I never know when they'll slip in a political post that'll just piss me off.

So I'm trying very hard to stay off the soapbox this election. I may not succeed; some things, I think, need to be said, and I'm not seeing them being said anywhere else. But I'm resisting the urge for now.

Speaking of soapboxes, I went to a soapbox derby in Sand Springs yesterday. There used to be a big annual raft race here, but it was discontinued almost twenty years ago. So as an alternative event, they decided to hold a soapbox derby and put out the call for entries earlier this year. Seeing as how this was the first year, they expected maybe 15-16 entries.

They got over 100.

Talk about a community desperate for some fun amidst a storm of bad news.

If you don't know what a soapbox derby is, it's basically a go-kart race without motors. Teams build a non-powered cart and roll it down a hill; the fastest one wins. Most of the teams weren't built for speed, though. The carts came in all shapes and sizes, and most of them were advertising some kind of sponsor. The Carrier cart was an air conditioner housing on wheels. The Blue & Gold Sausage cart was a gigantic pig's head that barely fit through the gates at the finish line. The PSO cart was a big electric transformer.

Some were rickety home-built contraptions. Others were obviously built by engineers. Zebco, the fishing reel company, entered a street luge that said it had been built by the Zebco Skunkworks.

We didn't stay for the entire day, but the time we spent was a lot of fun. Entertaining racers, a lot of creativity, and perfect weather in an old-fashioned small town community. It's not how I want to spend every Saturday, but it was fun for this one.

Black God's Kiss

I finally got around to finishing another book from the WorldCon stack. It was slow going, this one.

Black God's Kiss collects the Jirel of Joiry short stories written by C.L. Moore for Weird Tales in the 30's. Jirel was the first sword-and-sorcery heroine, so her stories have a special place in the hearts of fans of the genre.

That said, I had a hard time getting through the book. It isn't badly written, at least not according to the standards of the pulps Moore was writing for. The style is a little overblown at times, but there is a lot of imagination at work here, with moments that come alive quite vividly. And Jirel is an interesting character, as interesting as a character can be in stories that very deliberately avoid character exploration.

No, the thing that held me back was that Jirel is a swordswoman who rarely uses her sword, a fighter who rarely fights. Not that she's some Zen master just wishing for a little peace and quiet or anything. No, she's fiercely eager to run through whomever she can.

The problem is that every story pits her against magical powers she can't fight with a sword, in an alien landscape she can barely comprehend (and often can't even see-she wanders through darkness a lot of the time). The stories read more like Lovecraft's Dream tales than Howard's Conan stories. Jirel wanders through places she doesn't know with properties she doesn't understand and encounters creatures she's never seen before. It gets kind of tiring after a couple hundred pages. I picked up the book expecting action and never really got it.

That being said, I like the look of Paizo Publishing's Planet Stories line, and the concept of republishing stories from the heyday of the pulps. I'll probably end up picking some of their other titles.

Heroes Season 3

I was busy on Monday night, but I finally got around to watching the Heroes season 3 opener. And as is usual with Wheel of Heroes, I find myself torn between, "That's effin' awesome" and "why the hell did they do that?"

Things I liked:

- The revelation that Peter shot Nathan I thought was cool, but also disliked (see below)

- Claire asking Sylar if he was going to eat her brain, and his reply of "That's disgusting."

- Cute speedster chick

- Elle's awesome reaction to Sylar's attack--perfectly in keeping with what we learned about her character last season, it both solves a present problem while opening up an entirely new one

- The out-of-nowhere revelation about Sylar's origin = kick-ass

Things I didn't like;

- The blatant movie ripoffs--Claire hiding in the closet with louvered doors, clutching a knife (straight out of "Halloween"), and Suresh suddenly turning into Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg's "The Fly"

- Once again, the story turns on time-travelers trying to prevent a future they've witnessed--Future Peter's dystopia, Hiro's glimpse of disaster, Mama Petrelli's dreams

- The introduction of a new Ali Larter character to replace StripperHulk--this could be cool, but smacks of desperately trying to have it both ways, i.e. retain a popular actor in the cast while dumping a character who has run out of story options

- characters who have not been written out undergoing wild changes in personality for plot convenience--Suresh's sudden mania to have powers, Nathan's freaking bizarre religious conversion

I'm looking forward to future developments, but damn, this show can be frustrating even when it's good.

No Scoobies?

I finally got around to watching the first two episodes of the new season of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" on Hulu. I watched the first one last night and the second one this afternoon. About five minutes into it, Sarah tells John he needs to go back to school.

So John goes to school and there's a scene where he's standing in the hallway, with scabs on his cheek and forehead from last episode's mayhem, looking at the chattering teenagers all around him, and it's obvious he feels completely isolated. And at that point, I paused the program to make a sandwich and muse on my happiness with the fact that this show has developed so much better than it could have.

I mean, it's not perfect; the time travel/parallel universes stuff is enough to make narrative hash out of any show (witness the second season of Heroes; the third season looks good, but I fear that there will be more time travel nonsense to muck it all up).

But for a show that features a high schooler on a mission to save the world, it could have been so much worse. That is to say, I love Joss, but it would have absolutely destroyed this show to go the Buffy route, with John just happening to befriend a group of high school students who are improbably good at armed and unarmed combat and computer hacking and all the rest.

So I sit down, thinking warm, fuzzy un-Scooby thoughts while eating my sandwich and watching the show, and of course, what do they do? They introduce a high school girlfriend for John who is almost certainly more than she appears. And I find that, although I like the actress (she's hot), and I'm all for John getting some and lightening up a little, I'm not thrilled with any of the most likely directions the writers will take this. Three possibilities:

1) She's a Terminator sent to get close to John and kill him. Not likely, since John slept in the same room with her and wasn't touched.

2) She's a human spy from the future, either sent by John himself to protect him, or maybe some kind of turncoat sent by the robots to seduce him into giving up his mission or something.

3) She's just a normal human, which gives three options: she gets killed, leaving John heartbroken but vengeful; she freaks out and leaves him, leaving John confused; she becomes a Scooby.

Don't let her be a Scooby, please.

Random Observation

Book five of the Worldcon stack is Black God's Kiss by C.L. Moore, and while I'm not ready to write the full review yet, I do have one strange observation.

Almost all the characters have names starting with G or J, at least so far. First of all, it's weird to have so few characters in a book--I'm almost a hundred pages in and there have only been five male and three female characters named--but to then have almost all those characters have names starting with the same letters is just bizarre.

Not only that, but all the G characters are men, and all the J's are women. Maybe the distribution will approach greater normality the farther I get (after all, the last man introduced was the first non-G name, so maybe she realized what she was doing). But it's just weird.